At Ease with the Dead

by Walter Satterthwait

  He did this, leaning the rifle carefully against the rock, barrel skyward.

  “Both hands in the air now. Stand up.”

  Arms raised, he stood back away from the boulder.

  “Turn around.”

  He was about my height, six two, and a bit bulkier, outweighing me by fifteen or twenty pounds. Without the stocking mask, he was actually quite a dreamboat. Strong, handsome features: a square jaw, an aquiline nose, the innocent brown eyes of a doe. A Hispanic Tom Selleck.

  He wasn’t very pleased to see me. The first thing he said was, “I should’ve cut your balls off when I had a chance.”

  “The snows of yesteryear, Pablo. Put your hands back behind your neck. Fingers locked. Now here’s what’s going to happen. We’re going to walk down to the cabin. You’re going to stay six feet ahead of me. If you make a move to the left or right, if you do anything even a little bit tricky, I’m going to shoot you in the leg. And then I’m going to kick your ass all the way down the mountain. Understand me?”

  He was looking at the pistol, his eyes narrowed. “That’s Ramon’s gun,” he said.

  “We traded toys,” I said. “Let’s go. And Pablo? I saw what you did to Peter Yazzie’s cousin. I’d be happy to blow your leg off.”

  “Fuck you,” he sneered.

  I had him properly terrorized, no doubt about it.

  I nodded toward the clearing. A faint trail loped down between the scrub brush and the rocks. “Go.”

  He went.

  “Who sent you up here, Pablo?” I asked the back of his head. “Whose idea was it to kill Peter Yazzie?”

  He turned his head slightly and said over his shoulder, “Fuck you.”

  It seemed that Pablo, like his friend Luis, didn’t possess much in the way of small talk.

  I should’ve been ready for him to make a move. I should’ve seen it coming. I wasn’t, and I didn’t. Foolishly, I was looking down toward the cabin, where Daniel Begay was stepping out the front door. I was wondering if Peter Yazzie were still alive.

  The trail wound past a small ponderosa at the edge of the clearing. At chest height, a branch of the pine hung over the path. As he reached it, Pablo notched the branch below his elbow, walked a few more paces with it braced against his chest, and then, in a single swift sidestep, slipped neatly away. The branch snapped up and back like a catapault and whipped across my face.

  Instinctively, moving too late to protect my eyes, I raised the barrel of the Beretta. In the next instant, Pablo was on me, going for the gun.

  The branch had slashed at my eyes—I couldn’t see through the blur of tears. But I could feel. He had one powerful hand clamped around my right wrist, the other clamped at my throat. I sensed him shifting his weight, knew he was about to use his knee, and I swiveled to the right. His knee thumped into my hip and I brought up my left foot and knifed it down onto the spot where his instep should be.

  He grunted and his leg buckled, but he didn’t let go. Suddenly we were both heading for the dirt, me on top of him, my wind knocked away, and then him on top of me as we tumbled ragtag down the slope. Somewhere in the acrobatics, the gun got lost.

  And then we were free of each other and I was scrambling to my feet, still blinking away tears. I didn’t know where the gun was, but Pablo might, so it seemed fairly imperative to get to him before he got to it. He must’ve had the same idea, because the next thing I knew he threw himself at me and I went hurtling down the hill.

  I hit the ground on my back and slid along the pine needles, and then Pablo was there again and his foot was coming at my ribs.

  The foot smashed into my side and air whooshed from my lungs as I felt something crack, but I caught his leg in both arms and wrenched it to the side, against the knee joint, and he came down, grunting again.

  I hadn’t felt any real pain yet—too much adrenaline flooding the system—but just then, as I pulled myself up, a sharp precise flame went ripping along my left side. Something broken in there.

  Irrelevant now. We were both on our knees and Pablo was turning to me and I put everything I had into a roundhouse left to his face. His head snapped to the side, but he kept enough presence of mind to wrap his hand around a jugged hunk of rock and then turn to me, slashing it toward my skull.

  I dodged back and he followed through by hurling the rock. It whacked into my right shoulder, numbing my entire arm, and then he came to me, head lowered, and grabbed my arms and he butted me, his head snapping up and ramming my jaw. My teeth clacked together and my eyes lost focus, and then he was atop me again, arms around my throat, and what little air I had was going.

  He said, through clenched teeth, the corners of his mouth spotted with foam, “You’re as dead as that fuckin’ Indian, asshole.”

  Wrong thing to say. I remembered William Yazzie heaped in front of the oven door, remembered the slowly weeping burns along his body, and I went crazy.

  It was a cold, deliberate kind of madness, but it was madness nonetheless. Even with my head pounding, my eyes beginning to swell, I didn’t black out. My vision didn’t mist over. Throughout all of it I saw him with an almost surreal clarity: the narrowed dark brown eyes, the lips curled back from the gritted teeth, the clownish streaks of sweat running though the gray dust that powdered his face.

  I brought up my hands and whapped them, as hard as I could, palms flat, against his ears.

  For an instant his grip on my throat loosened. He shook his head and the grip tightened again. I banged his ears once more and he growled and pulled away his right fist, he was going to pound at me until I stopped, and I drew back my right hand and I suddenly straightened the arm, all the power of my shoulder behind it, and I drove the base of my palm up against the base of his nose.

  It was a killing stroke, driving splinters of cartilage and bone into his brain, and it was one I thought I’d never use.

  Pablo’s eyes rolled and he made a sudden sad little sound, almost a sigh of regret, and then he shuddered once and toppled over.

  I pushed his leg away. After a long moment, I sat up. After another moment, I rolled over onto my hands and knees and I retched, pain seering along my rib cage. It seemed for a while that I wouldn’t ever stop retching.

  That was how Daniel Begay found me, crouched like a wounded animal, head hanging limp over a spill of vomit.

  I pushed myself off my knees and sat down again, gasping at the pain. I looked up at him and wiped my mouth against the sleeve of my windbreaker.

  “You okay?” he said.

  I nodded. “Peter Yazzie?” I already knew the answer; Daniel Begay wouldn’t be here if Peter Yazzie were still alive.

  “Dead,” he said, and then he limped over to Pablo, put his fingers along the man’s neck.

  I lowered my head. So it had all been futile. The race to Hollister, the drive over the mountains. The deaths of Ramon and Pablo. Five deaths, including Alice Wright and William Yazzie and now his cousin. All for nothing.

  “I talked with him,” Daniel Begay said. “Last night, at the shrine.”

  I looked up at him. “He told you why all this was happening?”

  He nodded.

  He told me about it back in the cabin while he took tape from his duffel and wrapped it around my ribs. Peter Yazzie lay silent and still beneath the olive drab blanket.

  Afterward, outside, we went over our options. Daniel Begay told me that he and his nephew could handle everything here. I told him to call Rita, let her know how I could reach him.

  By my watch, it was only eight-thirty. I felt as though I’d been up and awake and wretched all my life. The adrenaline was gone now and I was listless and creaky and sore, and the taste of ashes in my mouth told me that I’d carry for a long time the knowledge that three men had died here this morning.

  I went back to the Subaru, took a codeine tablet from the first-aid kit and washed it down with water from the canteen. Only one tablet; I had another long drive ahead of me.

  I reached the Flagstaff airport at el
even-thirty, just in time to catch the twelve o’clock America West flight to Phoenix. In Phoenix, I killed some of the two-hour layover by making a few phone calls. I didn’t call Rita: I didn’t think she’d approve of what I had in mind. I killed some more time by wincing and hissing whenever I moved too suddenly. A little after three, I climbed onto another airplane, and by five-fifteen I was back in El Paso.

  I rented a Chevy, then found myself a bottle of Jack Daniels and a motel room, this one in a new motel. I knew I shouldn’t be drinking—I had to be awake early in the morning—but I drank anyway. I drank until I stopped seeing dead people, until they left me in peace, and that took a while.

  25

  McKelligan Canyon was a former rock quarry that had become part of a big municipal park. It still looked like a rock quarry. Three or four miles long, gray and grim in the muddy light of dawn, it was a huge winding trench scooped from the side of the mountain. The bleak rock walls, two or three hundred feet tall, leaned over the small rented Chevy as I wheeled it down the narrow blacktop at the bottom.

  I approached a sign that gave directions to McKelligan Park Amphitheater, off to my left. I kept driving. The rock walls grew higher, pushing back the cloudy gray sky.

  It was hard to believe that I was still within the limits of a city. Of any city. I could have been cruising along the depths of a lunar crater, blasted and bare. And yet this was the same mountain whose western slope the Subaru and I had climbed only three days ago, when I went to see Martin Halbert.

  The road looped back upon itself where the canyon ended. The cliffs towered in a steep semicircle around a narrow picnic area. Between the arroyos that gullied the canyon floor, four or five translucent fiberglass canopies shielded metal tables and benches from sunlight that hadn’t reached them yet, and, from the look of that sky, might never reach them. Parked beside the first of the tables was a red Trans-Am, pretty much the sort of car I expected. And sitting at the table, his elbow against its surface, his chin resting in his palm, was Emmett Lowery.

  I parked the Chevy behind the Pontiac and got awkwardly out of the car—I’d been up for a couple of hours already, but I was still moving like a robot. I walked stiffly over to the table and sat down opposite Lowery.

  He looked as fit and vibrant as he had last Wednesday. His dark black bangs were neat and shiny. He was wearing jeans and another gray UTEP sweatshirt. This one had sleeves. He probably owned a whole closetful of the things, with sleeves and without. An outfit for every occasion.

  He sat back and grinned the same toothy boyish grin he’d grinned in his office. “Hey,” he said, and nodded to the bruise on my face. “That’s quite a shiner. What’s the other guy look like?”

  “Like he’s dead.”

  He frowned—genuinely surprised, I think. “Dead,” he repeated. He tried for the grin again, but it didn’t quite come off. “Come on. You’re kidding me.”

  I shook my head. “Getting shot at affects my sense of humor. So does shooting people.”

  He held up a hand, a gesture he probably used in the classroom. “Wait wait wait. Shooting people?”

  “It’s a long story. Begins over sixty years ago. But why don’t we start a little more recently. Why don’t we start with your slashing the tires on my car.”

  Another frown. This one was less convincing. “What?”

  “You’re the only one who could’ve done it. Wouldn’t have taken you long to find me. A few phone calls to the nearby motels.” As Rita had pointed out.

  He smiled then. “Now look, Croft. You asked me to meet you at what, let’s face it, is a ridiculous hour on a Monday morning. You wanted someplace private and open. All very mysterious. But intriguing, I’ll admit. So you got what you wanted.” The smile again. I liked his grin better. The smile was a professor’s smile, long-suffering and superior. It told me I was an idiot, annoying but perhaps, from time to time, mildly entertaining. “And naturally,” he said, “I’m flattered that you’d want to incorporate me into your paranoid fantasies. But why on earth would I want to slash your tires?” Smile. “As opposed, I mean, to someone else’s?”

  “To slow me down. It was fairly stupid. But you were in a bit of a panic, weren’t you, Emmett?”

  His mouth tightened for an instant when I spoke his name, but he managed another smile. “The last time I was in a panic was, let’s see,” he looked off, looked back at me, “the sixth grade. A history test.” He shrugged, still smiling. “As it happened, I aced it.”

  “Forget it, Emmett. I know you. I know who you are. You’ve been in a panic most of your life. Working out in the gym, hanging out in the singles bars. What’ve you got to show for it? How many women can you bench press, Emmett?”

  His face flushed. “Now just a minute—”

  “How does it feel to be a hollow middle-aged stud with some nice biceps and capped teeth and hair color that came out of a bottle?”

  He was leaning forward, his face folded shut. “Where the hell do you get off, talking to me like that? You want trouble? I’ll give you trouble, ace. I’m a goddamn black belt, you dumb shit. I could rip your fucking head off.”

  “It might be fun to watch you try, Emmett, but I haven’t got time. Where’s Halbert?”

  His eyes blinked and his glance shifted quickly away, quickly back. “What? Halbert?”

  “Your pal. Your partner. Emmett, why do you think I asked you to meet me someplace in the open? Someplace like this? So you could tell your asshole buddy about it. So he could come along and listen in and find out what I knew. And you call me a dumb shit? God, Emmett, you are one pathetic dildo.”

  He swung himself off the bench and leaped into a fairly professional karate stance. He chopped at the air a few times. He looked deadly and efficient and very short. For a moment I was tempted to get up and step on him.

  He snarled, “Come on, motherfucker. Come on! Right now, right here. I’ll make you eat your fucking heart.”

  “That’ll be enough, Emmett,” said Martin Halbert, stepping lightly up from the arroyo where he’d been hiding. “Can’t you see what he’s doing? He’s trying to get you angry. And he seems to be succeeding admirably.”

  He wore cordovan loafers, dark brown socks, beige twill slacks, and a beautifully tailored light brown suede sportcoat over a blue oxford button-down shirt that contrasted nicely with his snow-white hair and his deep mahogany tan. He was still carrying his age very well. He was holding a gun, a revolver, and he carried that very well too.

  “Shoot the fucker,” said Emmett Lowery, and a few flecks of spittle flew from his lips. “Blow his fucking brains out.”

  “Calm down, Emmett,” said Martin Halbert, who hadn’t taken his eyes off me since he emerged from the arroyo. “Mr. Croft obviously has something to tell us. I think we should hear him out, don’t you?”

  “I think we should pound his fucking face in.”

  His gun still aimed unwaveringly at my chest, Halbert turned to him and the brown skin crinkled at the corners of his blue eyes as he smiled. “Sit down, Emmett. Don’t try my patience.”

  Lowery frowned. He took a breath, as though about to say something, and then abruptly he sat down at the far end of the bench. He glowered at me to convey the notion that if he’d had his way, I’d be porridge by now. Maybe he even believed it.

  Halbert sat down on the bench, opposite me, his body moving with the easy grace of someone twenty years younger. The gun barrel continued to point at my chest.

  “Now,” he said. “Mr. Croft. I gather that you think you know something important. Perhaps you’ll be good enough to share with us what it might be.”

  “I know that Emmett’s father killed Dennis Lessing. I know that he stole the remains of a Navajo named Ganado from Wright’s study.”

  “That’s bullshit!” said Lowery. “Pure unadulterated bullshit. Who the fuck do you think you are?”

  “Quiet, Emmett,” said Halbert. He smiled at me. “And why would Emmett’s father do something like that?”


  “Because your father asked him to. Your father wanted leases on the land where Lessing had found oil. Navajo land. The head of the Navajo Tribal Council, a man named Leo Chee, refused to sign them. Ganado was one of Chee’s ancestors. Once your father had the body, he had the leverage he needed with Chee. All he had to do was threaten to scatter the body somewhere in the desert. Throw it in a river somewhere. A traditional Navajo would do almost anything to avoid that. And Chee was a traditional Navajo, at least partly. And your father sweetened the pot a bit. Gave him a small kickback in cash, for the part that wasn’t traditional. And so Chee signed the leases. It turned out, though, that he couldn’t live with himself after what he’d done. A few months later, he killed himself.”

  Daniel Begay had told me that the grandfather of the woman on the Reservation, the woman whose dreams started all this, had been head of the Tribal Council, and that he’d committed suicide. Not surprisingly, it hadn’t meant anything to me then.

  “This is bullshit, Croft,” said Lowery. “You can’t prove a single word of this.”

  Smiling, watching me, Martin Halbert lightly raised his left hand to signal for silence. “Why kill Dennis Lessing?”

  “It was Lessing’s guide, Raymond Yazzie, who told Lessing about Ganado. That he was Chee’s ancestor. Lessing told your father, and your father knew what the body would mean to Chee. He told Lessing to go to Chee and blackmail him into signing the leases. Lessing refused—wouldn’t have anything to do with it. Probably, although there’s no way to prove it now, he planned to blow the whistle on the deal.”

  Halbert was still smiling pleasantly and the gun was still pointing at my chest.

  “But Emmett’s father,” I said, “didn’t have the same compunctions. He was ambitious. With Lessing gone, Jordan Lowery would be the king of the department. Especially if he had a rich patron like your father waiting in the wings. Ready to fund the oil-geology field trips, ready to offer scholarships to the school. And I’m sure your father gave Lowery a nice cash payment for delivery of the remains.”