People Of Darkness

Mary looked from Chee’s thumb to Chee’s face, her glance asking: Is this man for real? She shook her head. “Why? Why would you do that?”

“Takes the strain off the spring,” Chee said lamely.

Suddenly she leaned against him. He felt her shaking. “Sorry I’ve been so bitchy,” she said, talking into his coat. “I’m not used to this.”

“Me either,” Chee said.

“That man back there. Was that Mr. Charley? The one you were looking for? He was dead, wasn’t he? Did that blond man kill him? Do you know what’s going on?”

“Yes,” Chee said. “And no. It was Charley. He was dead. And I don’t have any idea what the hell is going on.”

While he was saying it, Mary became aware of the blood on his shirt. Childish as he knew it was, being wounded made him feel a little less foolish. If the rib hadn’t hunt so much, and if he hadn’t had a five-mile walk back to the highway ahead of him, it would have been almost worthwhile.

14

COLTON WOLF had left tracks. Two witnesses had seen him. Close and clearly. They could identify him. They could connect him with murder and with a rented car. The car-rental connection would provide other witnesses and uncover the false identity. He gunned the Plymouth down the access acceleration lane and onto Interstate 40 west. There was no time wasted deciding what to do. He’d decided that before he’d left his trailer. This was Plan B. Plan B was what he did if the operation created the sort of disturbance that made the routine withdrawal in some way risky. There had been a Plan B and variations of Plan B for each of his previous operations. But he’d never used one before because there had never been a disturbance. Previously, the targets had died unobserved, quietly and unobtrusively. The only exception had been the old CPA in Reno. The man had suspected something. Perhaps it had been the product of a guilty conscience, perhaps the product of age and wisdom. At any rate, part of the information provided to Colton had been the detail that the target would be alert and wary. And he had been. Colton had spent an extra day scouting because of that. And the set-up had seemed perfect. The accountant’s office had been on the fifth floor of a downtown bank building. At midmorning for three consecutive days the old man had emerged from his office, crossed the corridor to the men’s rest room, and relieved himself. Rest rooms were ideal. And this had been the best kind. A single-stall men’s room. The jimmy blade flicking the latch open. The victim startled, embarrassed, refusing to credit what his eyes were telling him – that the intruder upon his privacy was pointing a pistol at his forehead. The victim starting to blurt some banality like “This booth is occupied.” The voice being stopped by the thud of the silenced.22. The bullet fired into the hair, where it would go undetected for a time. The body propped on the stool. The unhurried departure. But this time it had been different. The old man had sensed something when Colton had come into the room. Through the gap beside the booth door, Colton had seen a single eye peering out at him, and the screaming had started the moment the jimmy touched the latch. The man was up from the stool, pants around ankles, trying to resist. It had taken three bullets and a little more time, and then, as he was propping up the body, the door had swung open and the old man’s secretary had burst in. He had shot her twice, and wedged her body in with the old man’s, and walked away. It had been tense for a moment, but when he emerged from the elevator, there had been absolutely no tracks left behind. He had dumped the pistol by opening the emergency hatch and putting it on top of the elevator car. When he stepped through the doors into the bank lobby, there was no chance of connecting him with the bodies in the men’s room. He had hated to lose the pistol, but it couldn’t be traced. There had been absolutely no tracks.

This time there were tracks everywhere. He drove west on Interstate 40 past the Grants interchange, thinking about them. Out here tracks were easy to follow. Too few people in too much space. Had all gone smoothly, Colton would have driven back to Albuquerque, checked in the car at the airport, picked up his truck, and returned to his trailer. That was Plan A, simple and quick. Then, after a few days, he would have hitched the trailer to the truck and moved along. Somewhere warmer. Maybe Houston, or maybe somewhere in California. It didn’t matter where. Until he could find his mother. Then there would be a home place. A place to settle.

But now he had to use Plan B. That took him in the other direction – to Gallup. There he would check the car into a garage for a major tune-up, leaving a Gallup number to be called when repairs were completed and telling the mechanic that there wasn’t any hurry. That would mean days before the car surfaced. He’d walk to the bus station, take the next bus to Phoenix, and fly back to Albuquerque.

He drove exactly five miles above the speed limit – the margin highway patrolmen allow. There was no serious hurry. He’d bought himself some hours by burning the policeman’s can and radio. He’d wounded the man, probably in the abdomen. And it would take the woman at least three hours to walk out of the lava rock and turn in the alarm. By the time any serious search could be organized, he’d be well into Arizona. Outside the circle.

A semi-trailer rig breezed past him, going perhaps fifteen miles above the limit. That would mean the trucker’s CB had assured him he was safe from the state police. But Colton held the rental Plymouth at a steady sixty. He was thinking how he would erase his tracks. Not since he was a boy had Colton felt so vulnerable. He knew the Indian policeman had seen him at the auction, cleanly and close up. The policeman and the woman had seen him again on the lava. The policeman and the woman had to be killed just as quickly as Colton could manage it.

15

THE WAY JIMMY CHEE WAS PROPPED against the pillows, he could shift his eyes to the left and look out the window of his fifth-floor room in the Bernalillo County Medical Center and see, across Lomas Avenue, the tan book tower of the University of New Mexico library and the modern-sculpture form of the Humanities Building. If he shifted his eyes to the night, he’d see on the TV screen the has-beens and never-would-bes of Hollywood Squares pretending to enjoy themselves. The TV screen was silent, the sound turned off. All Chee could hear was the voice of Sheriff Gordo Sena, whose face Chee could see when he turned his eyes straight ahead. Voice and face were angry. “What I want you to do,” Sena was saying, “is drop all the bullshit. Just tell me some by-God truth for once. I want to know how you knew Tom Charley had that box. And what was in it. And what happened to it. And how come that feller in the Plymouth was after him.”

And what I’d like to know, Chee was thinking, is how Gordo Sena got past the nurse. The FBI people had come earlier, while he was trying to eat his breakfast, and the nurse had peered in at him and said, “You’re not ready to talk to police, are you,” and that had been the end of the FBI. But thirty minutes later, Sena had simply pushed the door open, stalked in, turned off the TV volume, sat in the bedside chair, and said, “By God, we’re going to get some things straightened out.” It was now about thirty questions later.

“I didn’t know Charley had the box,” Chee said for the third time. “It was an educated guess. I told you what Mrs. Vines told me. About thinking the burglary had a religious connection. Well, the religion is peyote, and Charley is the peyote chief. One plus one is two.”

“Was,” Sena corrected. “Was the peyote chief. So you just walk up to Charley and ask him if he’s the burglar, and he admits it. That’s what you’re trying to get me to believe.”

“That’s what happened,” Chee said. “Not quite, but just about.” His ears were ringing, and his rib hurt, and the nausea that had come and gone all morning was coming again. He didn’t feel like talking. He closed his eyes. Sena’s glowering face went away, but not the voice. Question after question about why Charley had stolen the box, what Charley had said was in the box, what Charley had said about the Vineses. Questions that explored from every possible angle what Chee knew about the blond man in the green-and-white Plymouth.

“What kind of voice did he have?” Sena asked.

Chee opened his eyes. “Never talked to him.” He’d told Sena that before. Twice, in fact.

“That’s right, you didn’t,” Sena said. His alert eyes were studying Chee’s face. Why did Sena think they had