Tony Hillerman - People Of Darkness

So how was the blond man protecting himself against the radio call? Chee went over what he knew of the blond man again, incident by incident, from the hospital to the very beginning and the bombing of Emerson Charley’s truck in the parking lot. When he reached that, he knew exactly what the blond man had done and what he was waiting for.

He had put a bomb in Chee’s pickup. Now he was off somewhere in the darkness, out of the wind and totally unfindable, waiting patiently for Jim Chee and Mary Landon to blow themselves to pieces.

It took Chee only a few minutes to climb the outcrop. From atop that table of stone, he could look directly down into the bed of the truck thirty feet below. It was too dark to be sure, but he could see nothing in the pickup bed that hadn’t been there before. If the blond man had placed a bomb, it wasn’t likely he had put it in the same place he had used in his effort to kill Emerson Charley. Here, most likely, he would have placed it on the truck frame under the body. If the FBI knew what it was talking about, his bombs detonated when they were moved. Driving over the first bump would do the job. Under the cab, the effects would be certain.

The point where the outcrop jutted from the face of the butte was littered with chunks of fallen stone. Chee picked up one that weighed perhaps twenty pounds and carried it to the edge. He placed himself carefully, over the center of the truck bed. In the same motion he tossed the boulder and jumped backward away from the edge.

The crash of the boulder striking metal was engulfed a minisecond later by a great flash of light and sound. Chee, already off balance, found himself sprawling on hands and knees, his ears ringing and his eyes seeing only the red and white circles imprinted on his retinas by the flash. He lowered himself on the surface of the stone, waiting for sight and hearing to recover.

Soon he could hear a second sound through the receding ringing and see a flickering light through the flash blindness. The truck was burning. At first the flames from the burning gasoline flared above the rim of the outcrop, but they quickly lost their force. Now Chee lay in the darkness looking out across a landscape illuminated by the fire. It was the ideal place to be. When the blond man came to make sure of his victims, Chee would shoot him. Chee lay on his stomach, the cocked pistol held in front of him, waiting.

The wind rose, fanned the flames into a roar, and then died away. The snow drifted straight down again, still dry and feathery. The rock around Chee, blown clear by the most recent gusts, collected another thin layer of snowflakes. Gasoline and oil were almost exhausted now, and the fire fed itself on rubber and upholstery. Chee could smell the rancid black smoke of burning tires and plastic. The landscape the blond man would be crossing was white now. He would be easy to see in the firelight. But the blond man did not come. Through the sound of the fire below him, Chee heard the sound of a starter, and then of a motor, grinding in low gear. Across the ridge where the blond man’s pickup had been parked, there appeared a fan of light reflecting in the falling snow. Chee jumped to his feet. The light tilted upward, two visible beams jutting into the snowy sky. The truck was climbing out of the arroyo bottom. But the headlights were pointed away from the butte. The blond man was driving away.

THEY BUILT THE FIRE in the crevasse between two of the great fallen slabs in a sheltered cul-de-sac protected from the wind. Chee had picked the spot carefully and then had made a walking circuit, assuring himself that no light, even dimly reflected, was visible. The blond man had driven away toward the Bisti road. Chee had watched the truck lights moving eastward until finally they no longer reappeared through the falling snow. The blond man probably wouldn’t return. There was no reason for him to do so. But he might.

Now, finally, they were out of the wind. Mary Landon sat across from him, back against the vertical stone, her denimed legs stretched straight in front of her. Above them the wind gusted past the butte top with a hooting noise. Between these walls of fallen stone, it only caused the fire to flicker. But Mary shivered and hugged herself.

“I think it was a mistake,” she said, “leaving that note about Mr. Vines.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Mary said. “Because maybe he’ll go and shoot Vines – and you don’t know for sure Vines killed anyone. You don’t have any proof.”

“I know for sure,” Chee said.

“You don’t have anything to prove it with. You’re not a judge.”

Chee thought about that. The firelight was red, burning the rosin of dead piñon. It reflected on Mary Landon’s face, casting deep shadows where her hair fell across her forehead.

“Yes,” Chee said, “I am a judge. If the blond man kills Vines, then that’s justice. But he’s not going to kill Vines. He won’t have time. He can’t get there tonight because of the weather. If we get three inches of snow down here, there’ll be two feet of it up on Mount Taylor. The road won’t be open until they get a snowplow on it – and that won’t be until tomorrow morning. They’ll be using the snowplows where there’s more traffic.”

“Still, you don’t have any right to…”

“We don’t have much violence, we Navajos. What there is is mostly associated with witchcraft. Changing Woman taught us how to cope with the Navajo Wolves. We turn the evil around so it works against the witch.”

“But first you have to know for sure he’s the witch,” Mary said.

The snow started again, larger flakes now. The wind moaned around the butte top and the snowflakes eddied and swirled above them, lit by the redness of the fire. Some settled into the cul-de-sac. They landed on Chee’s knee, on Mary’s hair, on stone surfaces. Some drifted into the fire and vanished – cold touched by the magic of heat.

It was going to be a long, frigid night, and there was nothing that could be done until there was a little light. When it was light, the pipeline companies would be scouting their collection systems to make sure the abrupt drop in temperature had cracked no exposed metal, separated no joints, jammed no valves. The little slow-flying planes would be up looking for signs of gas leaks. Whatever those signs were. Spurts of blowing dust, Chee guessed. He remembered they had crossed the El Paso Natural Gas trunkline between Bisti and the butte. When dawn came, they would walk to it and build a smoky fire and wait to be spotted. Until then there was nothing to be done, except help time pass, avoid freezing, and think.

“I am born a Slow Talking People,” Chee said. “I’m also a member of the Red Forehead Clan because my father was one. And I’m connected with the Mud Clan, because my uncle – the one teaching me to be a singer – he’s married into the Muds. All of those clans have the same tradition. To become a witch, to cross over from Navajo to Navajo Wolf, you have to break at least one of the most serious taboos. You have to commit incest, or you have to kill a close relative. But there’s another story, very old, pretty much lost, which explains how First Man became a witch. Because he was first, he didn’t have relatives to destroy. So he figured out a magic way to violate the strongest taboo of all. He destroyed himself and recreated himself, and that’s the way he got the powers of evil.”

“I never heard about that,” Mary said. “I thought for a minute you were changing the subject. But you’re not, are you?”

“I’m not,” Chee said. “Lebeck decided to be a witch. He destroyed himself. And he came back.”

Mary was frowning at him. “Lebeck? The geologist at the oil well?”

“Yes; the geologist,” Chee said. “Think about what we know. We know the oil well was drilled through uranium, because the Red Deuce is now mining that deposit where the oil well stood. Lebeck was what they call the ‘well logger’ – the one who inspects samples of the rock they’re drilling through and maps the deposits. Very shallow, maybe down just fifty feet or so, the bit goes through pitchblende, a thick layer of the very richest uranium ore. So Lebeck suddenly knows something that’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars. How can he cash it in? He can cash it in only if, this oil lease is allowed to expire. Then he can file his own mineral lease claim. So he falsifies the log.”