Tony Hillerman - People Of Darkness

While he talked, quickly describing the deed, the man, and the pistol, and suggesting that the gunman was probably in a new green-and-white Plymouth sedan, his free hand touched the hair of the nurse, felt the cap, and found the small round hole burned in the crest of it.

“Make it two homicides,” Chee said. “He also shot the fifth-floor nurse.”

EVEN AS HE TROTTED down the stairs toward the laundry level something troubled Colton Wolf about the policeman’s room. Why was the unused bed rumpled? Had a visitor sprawled on it? It seemed too unkempt for that. But there was something else out of tune. He had left the loading dock and was walking toward the car he was using when he realized what it was. The smell around the face of the man he had shot was an anesthetic. Natural enough. But it was too strong. It was still being exhaled. Chee had been out of surgery far too long to smell like that.

“Son of a bitch!” Colton said. He ran back to the loading dock and was through the door before his caution stopped him. How had Chee escaped? Where was he now? He would have called for help. Certainly he’d be alert. And Chee was a very smart cop – that was clear. A second try now would be too risky. There wasn’t time.

He was out of the parking lot and heading westward on Lomas Avenue when he heard the first siren. But he wasn’t worried. No one had seen the car. He left it three blocks from where he had stolen it, walked to his pickup, and drove slowly back to his trailer. By the time he had reached it, his new plan for killing Jimmy Chee was taking shape. It was a good plan. This time Chee wouldn’t escape.

CHEE KEPT the control lever of the viewer pressed halfway to the right. Above his forehead, the microfilm reels hummed. The pages of the Grants Daily Beacon fled past his eyes like the boxcars of a freight passing a traffic signal. They moved too fast to be read, but not too fast to tell a front page from a grocery ad, or to spot the sort of black banner headline that would signal the kind of story he was looking for. Half of Chee’s attention focused on the moving image under his eyes. But he was aware of the silence of this huge basement room in Zimmerman Library, of the new.38 caliber revolver that weighted his coat pocket, and of Hunt pretending to be studying beyond the glass pane of the carrel door behind him. He was also aware of the nearness of Mary Landon.

The page that flashed below his eyes had a heavy black streak across the top. He stopped the reel and pushed the lever to the left to back it up. The headline read:

POLLS PROJECT DEWEY LANDSLIDE

“Ha!” Mary Landon said. “Wrong disaster.” She was sitting beside and a little behind him, saying nothing much. She brought to his sensitive nostrils the scent of clothing dried in sunlight, and of soap.

Chee pushed the lever to the right again and glanced up. A librarian moved down the aisle to his left, pushing a cart loaded with bound periodicals. A slender white girl with a fur-collared coat was hunting something in the microfilm files. Beyond her, movement caught Chee’s eye. An elbow, covered with blue nylon, jutted out from behind one of the square white pillars. It retracted, jutted out again, retracted, jutted. Doing what? Someone scratching himself?

Chee wanted suddenly to took over his shoulder, to make sure that Hunt was still in the carrel, alert and ready. He resisted the urge. Theoretically, Hunt was tagging along as a guard. But while it hadn’t exactly been spoken, it was understood that purpose number one was to get the blond man. Protecting Chee was a by-product. It sounded cold-blooded but it made sense. One protected Chee and Mary Landon by catching the blond man. There was no other way to do it. The law wanted very, very badly to catch the blond man. On the other hand, the world was full of tribal policemen.

Under his eyes, the record of June 1948 raced past and became July. The reels overhead hummed, paused, hummed again, paused again. On this pause the banner read:

WELL EXPLOSION KILLS CREW

“Here it is,” Chee said.

The subhead added:

TWELVE FEARED DEAD

IN BLAST ON RIG FLOOR

“Scoot over a little,” Mary said. She leaned over the projected page, pressed against him, reminding him again of sunshine and soap.

All members of an oil well drilling crew were apparently killed instantly northwest of Grants several days ago in what authorities believe to have been the premature explosion of a nitroglycerin charge.

Valencia County Sheriff Gilberto Garcia said the toll may be as high as twelve men, including ten working on the drilling crew on the east slope of Mount Taylor and two employees of the oil field supply company, who had brought in the nitro charge.

Garcia said the death toll is uncertain because the force of the blast “blew everything apart and scattered bits and pieces of people for half a mile.”

It looks like they had the nitro on the floor of the well when it went off,” Garcia said. “It didn’t leave much.” He said the explosion probably took place Friday, which was the day the crew from Petrolab, Inc., delivered the explosive to the site. The accident was not discovered until Monday, when a deputy sheriff went to the site to investigate why men working there had not been heard from.

Garcia said the well is about 25 miles north and west of Grants near the border of the Checkerboard district of the Navajo reservation. “We haven’t found anyone who heard the explosion,” the sheriff said. “No one lives for miles around out there.”

The sheriff said coyotes, other predators, and scavenger birds had complicated the problem of identifications. “We think we have one identification positive now, and we expect we have enough to pin down a couple of others, but we’re not too optimistic about the rest.”

He said payroll records named the drilling crew as Nelson Kirby, about 40, of Sherman, Texas, the crew chief; Albert Novitski, age and address unknown; Carl Lebeck, age unknown, a geologist who was logging the well; Robert Sena, 24, of Grants, and six as yet unidentified Navajos working on the well as a roustabout crew.

Also feared killed were R. J. Mackensen, about 60, and Theo Roff, about 20, both employees of Petrolab, a Farmington company which supplied the explosive.

Chee scanned the remaining paragraphs.

“Pretty much what Sena told you?” Mary asked. “The names ring any bells?”

“Just Robert Sena,” Chee said. “He was Gordo’s big brother.”

Mary was reading over his shoulder. “Carl Lebeck,” she said. “My cousin used to date a boy named Carl Lebeck. Or maybe it was Le Bow. Something like that.”

“Let’s see what they said when they found the Navajos were alive,” Chee said.

It was on the front page of the Wednesday edition, a brief item reporting that the crew of six Navajo laborers, originally believed killed in the explosion, hadn’t gone to work that day. The story included their names, which Chee copied off in his notebook. It didn’t mention why they had missed work. Chee found that in the following day’s paper. Again the headline stretched black across the top of the page:

ARREST MADE IN WELL BLAST

SHERIFF REPORTS NAVAJOS

GIVEN ADVANCE TIP

One of the Navajo workers who escaped last week’s fatal explosion at a Valencia County oil drilling site was being questioned today about reports that he had advance knowledge the explosion would occur.

Sheriff Gilberto Garcia identified the man as Dillon Charley. He said Charley has admitted warning five other Navajo coworkers at the well not to go to work last Friday “because something bad was going to happen.”

”He claims he got the warning from God in some sort of religious vision,” Garcia said. He said that Charley is the “peyote chief” in the Native American cult and that the five other Navajos on the work crew were also members of the religious organization.