sees Sam, or maybe Sam's flock, over there by the junipers. He parks. He heads directly toward Sam.' Leaphorn glanced at Gorman, saw no sign of disagreement. 'In a hurry, I'd say, because of the way he crashed through the sagebrush. He didn't know the arroyo was there behind the ridge, and couldn't get across it there, so he had to skirt upstream to where the banks get lower.'
'Not too smart,' Gorman said.
'Could be that,' Leaphorn said, although being smart had nothing to do with it. 'And when he got close to Sam he was in such a hurry to kill him that he started running. Right?' 'I'd say so,' Gorman said.
'Why did Sam start running?'
'Scared,' Gorman said. 'Maybe the guy was yelling at him. Or waving that shovel he killed him with.'
'Yeah,' Leaphorn said. 'That's what I'd guess. When we catch him, who do you think it will turn out to be?'
Gorman shrugged. 'No way of telling,' he said. 'It'd be a man. Big, man-sized feet. Probably some kinfolks or other.' He looked at Leaphorn, smiling slightly. 'You know how it is. It's always some sort of fight with some of his wife's folks, or some fight with some neighbor over where he's grazing his sheep. That's the way it always is.'
It was, in fact, the way it always was. But this time it wasn't. 'Think about him not knowing the arroyo was there. Not knowing where to find the sheep crossing,' Leaphorn said. 'That tell you anything?'
Gorman's pleasant round face looked puzzled. He thought. 'I didn't think about that,' he said. 'I guess it wasn't a neighbor. Anybody lives around here, they'd know how the land lays. How it drains.'
'So our man was a stranger.'
'Yeah,' Gorman said. 'That's funny. Think it will help any?'
Leaphorn shrugged. He couldn't see how. It did form a sort of crazy harmony with the Endocheeney affair. Bistie and Endocheeney seemed to have been strangers. What did that mean? But he'd met his quota. He'd added one fact to his homicide data. Wilson Sam had been killed by a stranger.
Chapter 11
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after many painstaking reconsiderations, Jim Chee finally decided he didn't know what the hell to do about the bone bead in Roosevelt Bistie's billfold. He had walked out of the visiting room and closed the door behind him, leaving Bistie's paper sack of belongings on the floor beside the chair, exactly where Bistie had put it. Then he stood by the door, looking at Bistie with a curiosity intensified by the thought that Bistie had tried to blast him out of bed with a shotgun. Bistie was sitting on the hard bench against the wall looking out of the window at something, his face in profile to Chee. Chee memorized him. A witch? Why had this man fired the shotgun through the skin of his trailer? He looked no different from any other human, of course. None of those special characteristics that the white culture sometimes gives its witches. No pointy nose, sharp features, broomstick. Just another man whose malice had led him to try to kill. To shoot Dugai Endocheeney, a stranger, on the roof of his hogan. To shoot Jim Chee, another stranger, asleep in his bed. To butcher Wilson Sam amid his sheep. As Bistie sat now, slumped on the bench, Chee had no luck relating his shape to the shape he had seen, or dreamed he had seen, in the darkness outside his trailer. His only impression had been that the shape had been small. Bistie seemed a little larger than the remembered shape. Could Bistie actually be the man?
Bistie lost interest in whatever he'd been watching through the window and glanced down the hall toward Chee. Their eyes met. Chee read nothing in Bistie's expression except a mild and guarded interest. Then the door of the phone booth pushed open and Janet Pete emerged. Chee walked down the hall, away from her, and out the exit into the parking lot and to his car, away from all the impulsive actions his instinct urged. He wanted to rearrest Bistie. He wanted to take the wallet and confront Bistie—in front of witnesses—with the bone bead. He wanted to make Bistie's possession of the bone a matter of record. But keeping a bone bead in one's billfold was legal enough. And Chee had absolutely no right to know it was there. He'd found it in an illegal search. There was a law against that. But not against bone possession or—for that matter—against being a skinwalker.
Having thought of nothing he could do, he sat in his car waiting for Pete and Bistie to emerge. Maybe they would leave without Bistie's sack. Simply forget it. If that happened, he would go to the jail, tell Langer that Bistie had left his belongings behind, get Langer to make another, more complete inventory, which would include all the billfold's contents. But when Pete and Bistie emerged, Bistie had the sack clutched in his hand. They drove out of the jail lot, turning toward Farmington. Chee turned west, toward Shiprock.
His mind worked on it as he drove. Reason told him that Bistie might not have been the shape in the darkness that had fired the shotgun into his trailer. Bistie had used the 30-30 on the rack across the back window of his pickup to shoot at Endocheeney. Or said he did. Not a shotgun. There had been no reason to search Bistie's place for a shotgun. Maybe he didn't have one. And the complex mythology of Navajo witchcraft, which Chee knew as well as any man, usually attached a motive to the malice of the skinwalkers. Bistie had no conceivable motive for wanting to kill Chee. Perhaps Bistie was not the one who had tried to kill him.
But even as he thought this, he was aware that his spirit was light again. The dread had lifted. He was not afraid of Bistie, as he had been afraid of the unknown. He felt an urge to sing.
The in-basket on his desk held two envelopes and one of the While You Were Out memos the tribal police used to record notes and telephone calls. One envelope, Chee noticed with instant delight, was the pale blue of Mary Landon's stationery. He put it in his shirt pocket and looked at the other one. It was addressed to Officer Chee, Police Station, Shiprock, in clumsy letters formed with a pencil. Chee glanced at the telephone memo, which said merely: 'Call Lt. Leaphorn immediately,' and tore open the envelope.
The folded letter inside had been written on the pulpy lined tablet paper schoolchildren use, in the format students are taught in grade school.
In the block where one is taught to put one's return address, the writer had printed:
Alice Yazzie
Sheep Springs Trading Post
Navajo Nation
Dear Nephew Jim Chee:
I hope you are well. I am well. I write you this letter because your Uncle Frazier Denetsone is sick all this summer and worst sick about this month. We took him to the Crystal Gazer over at the Badwater Clinic and the Crystal Gazer said he should let the belagana doctor there give him some medicine. He is taking that green medicine now but he is still sick. The Crystal Gazer said he should take that medicine but that he needs a sing too. That will get him better faster, having the sing. And the sing should be a Blessing Way. I heard that you did the Blessing Way sing for the Niece of Old Grandmother Nez and everybody said it was good. Everybody said you got it
