People of Darkness jlajc-4

by Tony Hillerman

  He glanced at Mary.

  To die, or seem to die, and to come back as B. J. Vines, she said.

  Yes, Chee said. But when the nitro truck arrived, something went wrong. Dillon Charley’s crew didn’t show up for work.

  How did Dillon Charley know?

  The Lord Peyote told him in a vision, Chee said. Or perhaps Lebeck warned himwhich I doubt. Or perhaps Dillon Charley saw things that made him nervous. I think Charley was a very perceptive man. Mrs. Vines told me that her husband and Dillon Charley were friendshad a sort of rapport. Perhaps that was already true when Vines was Lebeck. Chee shrugged. Who knows? Lord Peyote, or nervousness about nitroglycerin, or what? Anyway, he didn’t show up that day, and he warned his crew away. I think Lebeck wanted them all there. No one else around here knew him. No one else would recognize him as Vines. But he didn’t have any choice. The nitro truck came. He had to act then or never.

  How did he do it? Mary asked. ,

  I have to guess. Obviously he left the rig. I’d say he probably got far enough away to be safe, and he had a rifle and fired a shot into the nitro bottle at the proper moment.

  Mary Landon shivered again and hugged herself. And then he just walked away, so he’d be counted among the dead. Didn’t he have a family? A mother and father? People who loved him?

  I don’t know anything about Lebeck, Chee said. :

  And then to come back here. Wouldn’t he be afraid someone would recognize him?

  Probably nobody knew him, or had even seen him much. Just the well crew. It was an isolated place. Hardly a road then, and the crew would have lived out at the well, where nobody saw them. And then he stayed away two years. Maybe a little more. Long enough for the mineral lease to expire. Long enough to grow a heavy beard. Who knowsmaybe he did something else to change his looks. I said we didn’t know anything about Lebeck, but we do know a little. You get into the paratroops by volunteering. And once he was in, he won two top decorations for courage. So I guess he wasn’t afraid of taking chances. Or of killing, either. He must have done a lot of it. Chee paused, thinking about it. I guess he knew he’d have some more to do.

  The People of Darkness, Mary said.

  Yeah. He couldn’t count on Dillon Charley forgetting him.

  You think Dillon Charley saw Vines and recognized him as Lebeck?

  Maybe. But I’ll bet Lebeck didn’t wait for that to happen.

  I’ll bet he went looking for him. Maybe he told Charley the Lord Peyote had given him a vision, too. Or maybe he just offered him a job, money, so forth. He’d know Charley wouldn’t tell the sheriff anythingnot with the way Gordo was harassing him and his church. And besides, Charley wasn’t going to live very long.

  Lebeck knew Dillon Charley had cancer?

  Lebeck knew Charley was going to have cancer, Chee corrected. That black rock, it must be pitchblende. When the oil well bit drilled through it, Lebeck recognized pitchblende, and that’s the hottest kind of natural uranium deposit. He didn’t put it on the log, but he saved a piece of the core to test and make sure. And then he kept it because he saved mementos, and this one was going to change his life. Maybe he already knew it was going to be useful to him.

  You’re losing me, Mary said. How do you know it’s pitchblende? I never heard of it. How do you know so much about it?

  Out here everybody is prospecting half the time, Chee said. You learn about minerals, and mostly you learn about uranium-bearing minerals. I should have thought of it before. I think if we get a mineralogist to check those rock samples and those mole amulets, we’re going to find they’re radioactive. Vines gave Charley the mole knowing he would carry it in his medicine pouchhanging from his waist under his clothing right against the groin.

  Dillon Charley, and Tsossie, and Begay, and Sam, and all of them, Mary said. She shivered again.

  He didn’t overlook much, Chee said. I think Dillon Charley must have been the first to die, and Vines got the body and buried it, just in case an autopsy would show something. But Navajos don’t have much interest in bodies, and the authorities don’t have much interest in dead Navajos, and people got scattered out, so after Dillon Charley it wasn’t worth the trouble, I guess. It looked like he could quit worrying. Everybody on that work crew who had ever seen him as Lebeck was dead, or soon would be. Nothing to worry about for years.

  Not until Emerson Charley gets cancer, Mary Landon said.

  I think that’s right, Chee said. Old Dillon was a pretty important religious leader, and people like that sometimes try to pass it along to their children. I guess he gave Emerson his medicine bundle, hoping he’d become the peyote chief, and one day, years later, Emerson decides to revive the cult. He starts wearing old Dillon’s mole, and of course he gets sick

  Mary was leaning forward now. And Vines gets nervous, she said. Now it’s 1980, and Vines doesn’t want Emerson checking into a modern cancer research center, where he’s sure to undergo an autopsy, and so he hires somebody to kill him.

  And to steal the body, Chee said.

  And probably to get the mole back. But the blond man missed the mole.

  And Tomas Charley was too suspicious. The Navajos around Mount Taylor may not know a lot about radioactive pathology, but they could count up the fact that people who associated with Vines seemed to die. They knew he was a witch. When Emerson Charley’s truck was bombed, Tomas was suspicious. He wanted to prove Vines was a witch. He broke in and stole the box, and all Mrs. Vines knew was that the box was extremely important to Vines, so she asked me to get it back. I think she wanted to know Vines’ secret.

  The snow was falling more heavily now, drifting almost straight down out of an abruptly windless sky.

  Can’t we build that fire a little higher? Mary asked.

  A little, Chee said. He moved two chunks of pion trunk into the blaze.

  You can’t prove any of this, can you? Mary said. It wasn’t a question.

  I won’t have to, Chee said. I told the blond man. Tomorrow we’ll tell Gordo Sena. Sena won’t need proof either. Chapter Thirty-Two ^

  Chee passed the word to Sheriff Sena via the radio in an El Paso Natural Gas Company helicopter. The copter had found them where the epng collector pipe bridges Nagasi Wash. They had built a fire in the brush that flourishes there, and not ten minutes after the greasy smoke spiraled into the sky, the little Bell had puttered over the rise. The pilot was a young man with a scarred nose, a walrus mustache, and the emblem of a First Cavalry Division gunship unit sewed on his greasy flying jacket. He had already spotted their bombed pickup truck, and circled it curiously, and he was ready to believe Chee’s story of a police emergency.

  Chee told the sheriff’s dispatcher at Grants no more than Gordo Sena would need to know.

  Tell him the man who killed Tomas Charley is headed for B. J. Vines’ house. Tell him that Vines hired the man, and tell him that Vines’ real name is Carl Lebeck.

  Lee what? the dispatcher asked.

  Lebeck, Chee said. Be sure to get that right. Carl Lebeck. Except for describing the truck, and the blond man, Chee offered no more details. They would be redundant. Gordo Sena had lived for thirty years with the details of that oil well explosion burning in his mind. He’d know instantly who Lebeck was, and he was smart enough to put it all together. The dispatcher had said Sena had left for the Anaconda Mine. The same road led through the fringes of the Laguna reservation toward the high slopes of Mount Taylor and Vines’ place. About fifteen miles, Chee guessed, compared to the sixty they had to cover in the helicopter. But that last mile or two would be impassable to something on wheels. Sena would have to walk in. Chee would get there first,

  The thought excited him. At one level he was afraid of the blond man. At another, he longed to find him. His broken rib ached, as it had ached all morning. But it was more than vengeance. The man had shot him once. He had twice hunted Chee down to kill him. The memory still rankledof the interminable minutes spent on the metal duct above the hospital ceiling, of the helpless p
anic in the blowhole. Now he was the stalker. He tried to analyze the feeling. Expectant? Exultant? Something between, and something more. There was a mixture of fear and of the remembered childhood feeling of the hunt. The smell of smoke, of boiling coffee, the forest scents carried on the predawn dew. His uncle greeting the sun with the dawn chant and blessing them all with the sacred pollen and singing the final song to call the spirits of the deer. Through the scarred, oil-smeared Plexiglas he could see the Turquoise Mountain rushing toward them, its upper slopes a virginal white, glittering in the sunlight against a sky swept clean by the night’s storm. The thump of the copter blades covered the words as he repeated the Stalking Song. Perhaps Mary heard them, jammed as she was between him and the pilot. She glanced at him curiously.

  They found the blond man’s pickup truck about three twisting miles below the Vines house. Chee examined it through his binoculars, and the tracks told a story that was easy to read. The truck had slid off the narrow forest service road, losing traction on an upslope, where its spinning rear wheels moved sideways into the ditch. The driver had emerged, walked uphill several hundred yards, and then returned to the truck. He’d done this while the snow was still falling heavily, and his tracks were half-filled depressions. Later, when the snow was no longer falling, he had emerged again, walking uphill through snow that now was perhaps two feet deep. The new tracks were easy to follow, but there was no reason to follow them. They would lead to Vines’ house.

  The only question was whether they had yet reached the house. How fast could the blond man struggle uphill through deep snow? A mile an hour? At the butte the snowfall had stopped about 4:00 a.m. On the mountain, it would have lasted longer. Perhaps until 5:00 or 6:00.

  Let’s take the shortest way to Vines’, Chee said. When we’re there, get close to the ground and try to keep behind the trees. They’ll hear us, but I don’t want them to know where you’re letting me off.

  Letting you off? Mary said. You’re out of your mind. We’ll wait for the sheriff. He can’t get away now.

  No, Chee said. There’s something I have to do.

  The copter settled in a great cloud of feathery snow behind a cluster of blue spruce which screened off the garage. Chee dropped into a snowbank deeper than his knees and stood blinded for a moment while the copter pulled up and away. Then he ran, floundering, to the stone wall of the garage. The blond man, and Vines, and Mrs. Vines, anyone in the house, would have heard the copter, but they couldn’t have seen it, and they wouldn’t know it had dropped him. Still, he’d be careful. He stood against the wall, remembering the layout of the house. It sat with its back into the mountain slope, looking outward across the great panorama below. But the view was limited. Behind the house, the wall was low and windowless, and in many places one could step from the mountainside to the tile roof. Chee trotted around the garage. The tombstones of Dillon Charley and the first and faithful Mrs. Vines wore high white hats of snow. Behind the house, he stopped to listen. The stillness was almost totalthe silence of a windless morning on a mountain buried under new white insulation. From somewhere back in the forest, a fir limb bent and gave up its bushels of snow with a sibilant sound. From the house, only silence.

  Thirty feet ahead there was a doorway. Perhaps a laundry room, or some other sort of utility entrance. Chee moved toward it cautiously, keeping close to the wall, with the pistol, cocked, in his right hand. He tried the knob. Unlocked.

  Over the roof he heard the sound of the copter. It was approaching fast. The sound peaked, receded, and returned. First Cavalry was creating a distraction for him, Chee realized. Mary’s idea, probably. He pulled the door open and slipped inside.

  The room seemed almost totally dark. He stood, back to the door, giving his eyes a chance to make the adjustment from the brilliance of sunlight off snow to the interior gloom. He was in a sort of washroom/supply room. Down a short, narrow hall he could see into the kitchen. His ears told him absolutely nothing. The house was as silent as the snow outside. But something reached his nose. Acrid. The smell of blue smoke produced by gunpowder. Chee leaned against the edge of the clothes drier, unlaced his wet boots and removed them. He moved silently down the hall, placing his stockinged feet noiselessly. The kitchen was empty. It was lighter. The room was lit by a row of small high windows and more light came in from the broad doorway, which opened into what seemed to be a game room. Chee moved through the kitchen, back to the wall, trying to see into the adjoining room without being seen himself. He edged past the door of what was probably a pantry. Then he froze.

  From behind him came a quick gasping sound, a quick release of breath, a quick intake of breath. Someone was standing behind the door, inches away from his back.

  Chee slid away from the door. He stood beside it. Listening. His pistol was cocked. The safety off. He squatted just to the left of the door, facing it. He reached across his body with his left hand and gripped the knob. Then he thought. This was not where he would find the blond mannot hiding in a closet. He heard the clamor of the helicopter again from the front of the house, and he jerked the door open.

  The Acoma woman stood there. She looked startled, but she made no sound.

  Chee put a finger to his lips, signaling silence. Where is everyone? he whispered in English.

  The Acoma woman stared at his pistol. It was pointed at her stomach. Chee lowered it.

  A blond man came here, Chee said. Is he here?

  She seemed not to understand. She appeared to be stunned. Where is everyone? Chee repeated.

  The woman released another gasp of breath. El brujo est muerto, she said. That was all she would say. She said it twice, and then she turned abruptly and walked silently down the hallway and disappeared into the laundry room. Chee heard the outside door open. And then close.

  The witch is dead. Did she mean the blond man? Did she mean Vines? Not Mrs. Vines. She had used the masculine noun. The dead witch was male.

  Chee found him in Vines’ study. He sat behind the great desk, still upright because the swivel chair had been tilted slightly backward, and the impact of the bullet had pushed his head against the leather cushion. The light from the sunny snow outside streamed through the shutters and lit his face and showed a spot low on the forehead just above the bridge of his nose. It hadn’t bled much, but a trickle had run down across his cheek and into his white beard. B. J. Vines’ eyes were still open, but the witch was forever dead.

  Where was the blond man? Chee stood just inside the door, back to the wall, listening. He heard nothing. The copter had gone now. Had it landed? Vines’ dead face wore a look of shocked surprise. He had seen death coming. A tigress looked over his shoulder, her glittering glass eyes staring at Chee. Where was the blond man? Chee found himself thinking instead of B. J. Vines’ head mounted among those of the other predators, the blue eyes glittering. The blond man might have left. He would hardly stay after he had accomplished his purpose. Chee moved quickly around the desk. He put his finger against Vines’ throat. The skin was still soft and warm. He touched the bloody streak that ran down the side of the nose. Not even sticky yet. Vines had been dead only minutes. No more than five or ten. The blond man was close. Then where was Rosemary Vines? Perhaps she was away from home.

  Chee stood beside the desk, watching the door, listening. What would the blond man do? The copter thudded close again, hovering in front of the house. Mary trying to help. He remembered the blond man’s rifle. Stay away, Mary. Stay out of range. She was a woman among women. She made him happy. She was a friend. She made him feel like singing. She deserved nothing but beauty all around her. But now, stay away. The blond man must be in the house. Close. Doing what? Looking for servants? Making sure he’d leave no one alive to report this visit? Chee’s eyes rested on the telephone. The line would be cut. He picked up the receiver, expecting deadness. Instead he heard the buzzing dial tone. He dialed 0. It rang, and a woman’s voice said, Operator. Can I help you?

  Sorry, Chee whispered. He hung up. Why had the
blond man left the telephone intact? He hadn’t got to it yet. Then he heard the sound. Someone coughed. And coughed again.

  The blond man was sitting on the floor of the entrance foyer, his shoulder against the massive door. Blood was everywhere. It splashed across the polished wood, it soaked the blond man’s trousers, it spread in a still-growing stain across the patterned ceramic tiles of the floor. A pistol lay in the blood, black, with the long cylinder of a silencer on its barrel. The blond man coughed again. He glanced at Chee, then focused his eyes on him. He moved his lips, tentatively. Then he said:

  It’s cold.

  Chee could see what had happened. The shot had hit the blond man as he reached the door. One of Vines’ hunting rifles, probably. Something big. The slug had torn through him from the back, splashing the door with blood. It had broken the blond man as a stick is broken.

  Is there someplace warm? the blond man asked.

  Maybe the fireplace, Chee said. He put his pistol in its holster, walked through the blood, and squatted beside the blond man. He put an arm under his legs and an arm behind his shoulders and lifted himcarefully because the blood was slippery under his socks, carefully because the man was dying.

  In the big room, a log fire had burned itself down to flickering coals in the fireplace. Chee knelt in front of it and put the blond man on the skin of the polar bear. The man’s back was broken somewhere between the shoulder blades. The blond man’s head rolled toward the fire. His voice was small.

  There’s this detective agency, he said. Webster. In Encino. He’s going to find my mother. She’ll know about the cemetery. She’ll come and get me.

  All right, Chee said. Don’t worry.