It was midafternoon now, a little less than six hours before the 9:00 p.m. deadline the caller had announced for the transfer of drugs for money. It was humid—a rare circumstance for the Colorado plateau—and the thunderheads were boiling up northward toward Utah and over the Mogollon Rim to the West. Chee still felt the effects of the heat and dehydration of the sweat bath. He'd taken two huge drinks of water to replace the lost fluids and was, in fact, sweating again now. Still, he felt a kind of clear, clean sharpness in his vision and in his mind. Hosteen Nakai had taught him of the time when all intelligent things were still in flux, when what-would-be-animal and that- which-would-be-human could still talk together, and change forms. In a ceremonial way, the Stalking Way was intended to restore that ancient power on some much-limited intellectual level. Chee wondered about it as he waited. Was he seeing and thinking a little more like a wolf or a puma?
There was no way to answer that. So he reviewed all he knew of this affair, from the very beginning, concentrating on West. West the magician, causing him to think of mental telepathy instead of the mathematics of how a deck of cards can be divided. West misdirecting the attention of the Navajo buying the rope, misdirecting Chee's attention away from the easy solution of the three of diamonds, misdirecting attention away from why Joseph Musket's hands were flayed. Always distorting reality with illusion. And now, why was West asking only five hundred thousand dollars for a cocaine shipment that the dea said was worth many millions of dollars? Why so little? Because he wanted it fast? Because he wanted to minimize any risk that the owners wouldn't be willing to buy it back? Because West was not a greedy man? That was his reputation. And it seemed to be justified. He had no expensive tastes. No drinking. No women. As trading posts went, Burnt Water seemed to be moderately profitable, and West's prices, and his interest rate on pawn, showed no tendency to gouge. He was, in fact, known to be generous on occasion. Cowboy had told him once of West giving a drunk twenty dollars for bus fare to Flagstaff. Not the act of a man who valued money for money's sake.
So what would he do with five hundred thousand dollars? How would he use it, a lonely man with no one to spend it on, no one to spend it with? There must be a reason for demanding it, for setting up the steal, for the killing and the danger. A West reason. A white man's reason.
Chee stared out across the sandy bottom of Wepo Wash. Slowly, the white man's reason emerged. Chee checked it against everything he knew, everything that had happened. Everywhere it fit. Now he was sure West wouldn't come for the suitcases.
Chee left his hiding place, and walked back to the arroyo where he had left his patrol car. He drove it, with no effort at all at concealment, up the wash to the crash location. He parked it beside the basalt upthrust. His shovel was in his pickup truck but he didn't really need it. He dug with his hands, exposing the two suitcases, and pulled them out. They were surprisingly heavy—each sixty to seventy pounds, he guessed. He loaded them into the trunk of his patrol car, slammed the trunk shut, then reached in through the window and got his clipboard.
If he was right, this work was wasted. But if he was wrong, someone would come today—or someday—to dig up the cache and vanish with it. Questions would be left unanswered then, and Chee would no longer have a way to find the answers. Chee hated unanswered questions.
On the notepad on the clipboard, he wrote in block print: i have the suitcases. hang around burnt water and remember the number of letters in this message. Then he counted the letters. Seventy-nine.
He fished through the glove box, found an empty aspirin bottle he used to keep matches in, removed the matches, and folded in the note. He wiped off his fingerprints and dropped the bottle in the hole where the suitcases had been.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The village of sityatki, like many of the Southwest's pueblo villages, had been split by the human lust for running water. The original village still perched atop the east cliff of Third Mesa, from which it stared four hundred feet straight down into the sandy bottom of Polacca Wash. But along the wash itself, the Bureau of Indian Affairs had built a scattering of those brown frame-and-plaster bungalows which are standard government housing, equipped them with refrigerators and a pressure-tank water system, and thereby lured perhaps three-fourths of the younger residents of Sityatki down from the cliffs. The deserters, for the most part, remained loyal to village traditions, to their duties to the Fox, Coyote, and Fire clans which had founded it in the fourteenth century, and to the religious society into which they had been initiated. But they were usually present in the village only in spirit, and when ceremonial occasions required. Tonight, the presence of most of them was not required—was in fact discouraged—and the little stone houses which were theirs by right through the wombs of their mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers for twenty or so generations now stood empty. Tonight was the night of the Washing of the Hair, when the four great religious fraternities of the village—the Wuchim, the Flute, the One Horn, the Two Horn—initiate young people. For more than a week, the
Jim Chee knew this—or thought he knew it—because he had taken a course in Southwestern ethnology at UNM, which had taught him enough to pry a little more out of a reluctant and uneasy Cowboy Dashee.
Chee had never been to Sityatki, but he'd had Cowboy describe it in wearisome (for Cowboy) detail—from the layout of its streets to the ins and outs of its single dead-ended access road. Now he reached one of the few 'outs' the road offered, a side track which zigzagged downward to provide risky access to the bottom of Polacca Wash. His plan was to leave the car here, out of sight from the access road. If what Dashee had told him was accurate, a little after dark a priest of the One Horn Society would emerge from the society's kiva and 'close' the road by sprinkling a line of corn meal and pollen across it. He would then draw similar sacred lines across the footpaths leading into the village from the other directions, barring entry except by the 'spirit path' used by the kachinas. Chee's intentions were to reach the village when it was dark enough to avoid being seen by West, or anyone else who might know him, but before Sityatki was ceremonially closed against intruders. Chee parked the car behind a growth of junipers near the wash, transferred the flashlight from the glove box to the hip pocket of his jeans, and locked the door. About a mile to walk, he guessed, including the steep climb back up to the mesa rim. But he'd left himself at least an hour of daylight. Plenty of time.
He hadn't covered a hundred yards when he saw West's jeep. Like Chee's patrol car, it had been driven behind a screen of brush. Chee checked it quickly, saw nothing interesting, and hurried up the hill. He felt a sense of urgency. Why had West come so early? Probably for the same reason that had motivated Chee. He had probably called in the location of the meeting place at the last possible moment and then rushed to make sure he'd be here first and that no trap could be set for him. On the mesa top, Chee kept away from the road but near enough to watch it. An old pickup passed, driving a little faster than the bumpy road made wise or comfortable. Hopis, Chee guessed, hurrying to some ceremonial duty, or perhaps just anxious to get to their homes before the village was sealed. Then came a car, dark blue and new, a Lincoln edging cautiously over the stony surface. Chee stopped and watched it, feeling excitement rising. It wouldn't be a local car. It might be a sightseer, but the usually hospitable Hopis did not advertise this event, nor encourage tourists to come to it. More likely, the blue Lincoln confirmed his guess about where West had arranged the buy-back. This was The Boss coming to ransom his cocaine shipment. The car eased into a depression, moving at no more than walking speed. At the bottom of the dip, the rear door opened, and a crouching man stepped out, clicked the door shut behind him, and was out of sight behind the
