Down in Roosevelt Bistie's yard below, two more vehicles parked. Chee heard doors slam, the voice of Kennedy, the sound of Kennedy and Captain Largo coming up the slope. Chee's flashlight now was focused above the bullet wounds at a place on Bistie's left breast—a reddish mark, narrow, perhaps a half-inch long, where a cut was healing. It would seem, normally, an odd place for such a cut. It made Jim Chee think of Bistie's wallet, and the bone bead he had seen in it, and whether the wallet would have been dragged out of Bistie's hip pocket on his heels-first trip up this rocky slope, and whether the bone bead would still be in it when it was found.
He squatted beside Bistie, taking a closer look, imagining the scene at which this little healing scar had been produced. The hand trembler (or stargazer, or listener, or crystal gazer, or whatever sort of shaman Bistie had chosen to diagnose his sickness) explaining to Bistie that someone had witched him, telling Bistie that a skinwalker had blown the fatal bone fragment into him. And then the ritual cut of the skin, the sucking at the breast, the bone coming out of Bistie, appearing on the shaman's tongue. And Bistie putting the bone in his billfold, and paying his fee, and setting out to save himself by killing the witch and reversing the dreaded corpse sickness.
Chee moved the beam of his light up so that it reflected again from the glazed, angry eyes of Roosevelt Bistie. How did Bistie know the witch was Endocheeney, the man who all at Badwater agreed was a mild and harmless fellow? The shaman would not have known that. And if the two men even knew each other, Chee had seen no sign of it.
Behind him, the state policeman was shouting to Largo, telling him they'd found a body. The wind kicked up again, blowing a flurry of sand against Chee's face. He closed his eyes against it, and when he reopened them, a fragment of dead tumbleweed had lodged itself against Bistie's ear.
Why was Bistie so certain the witch who was killing him was Endocheeney? He had been certain enough to try to kill the man. How had their paths crossed in this fatal way? And where? And when? Now that Bistie was also dead, who could answer those questions? Any of them?
Largo had joined the circle now, and Kennedy. Chee sensed them standing just behind him, staring down at the body.
'There's what killed him,' the state policeman said. 'Two gunshots through the chest.'
Just on the edge of the circle of illumination, Chee could see the healing cut on Bistie's breast. Those two bullets had completed the death of Roosevelt Bistie. But the little wound high on his breast above them had been where Roosevelt Bistie's death had started.
Chapter 15
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the indian health service hospital at Gallup is one of the prides of this huge federal bureaucracy—modern, attractive, well located and equipped. It had been built in a period of flush budgeting—with just about everything any hospital needs. Now, in a lean budget cycle, it was enduring harder times. But the shortage of nurses, the overspent supplies budget, and the assortment of other fiscal headaches that beset the hospital's bead counters this particular morning did not affect Joe Leaphorn's lunch, which was everything a sensible patient should expect from a hospital kitchen, nor the view from his window, which was superb. The Health Service had located the hospital high on the slope overlooking Gallup from the south. Over the little hump in the sheet produced by his toes, Leaphorn could see the endless stream of semitrailers moving along Interstate 40. Beyond the highway, intercontinental train traffic rolled east and west on the Santa Fe main trunk. Above and beyond the railroad, beyond the clutter of east Gallup, the red cliffs of Mesa de los Lobos rose—their redness diminished a little by the blue haze of distance, and above them was the gray-green shape of the high country of the Navajo borderlands, where the Big Reservation faded into Checkerboard Reservation. For Joe Leaphorn, raised not fifty miles north of this bed in the grass country near Two Gray Hills, it was the landscape of his childhood. But now he looked at the scene without thinking about it.
He had been awake only a minute or two, having been jarred by the arrival of his lunch tray from a hazy, morphine-induced doze into a panicky concern for the welfare of Emma. He remembered very quickly that Agnes was there, had been there for days, living in the spare bedroom and playing the role of concerned younger sister. Agnes made Leaphorn nervous, but she had good sense. She'd take care of Emma, make the right decisions. He needn't worry. No more than he normally did.
Now he had finished the wit-collection process that follows such awakenings. He had established where he was, remembered why, quickly assessed the unfamiliar surroundings, checked the heavy, still cool and damp cast on his right arm, moved his thumb experimentally, then his fingers, then his hand, to measure the pain caused by each motion, and then he thought about Emma again. Her appointment was tomorrow. He would be well enough to take her, no question of that. And another step would be taken toward knowing what he already knew. What he dreaded to admit. The rest of his life would be spent watching her slip away from him, not knowing who he was, then not knowing who she was. In the material the Alzheimer's Association had sent him, someone had described it as 'looking into your mind and seeing nothing there but darkness.' He remembered that, as he remembered the case report of the husband of a victim. 'Every day I would tell her we'd been married thirty years, that we had four children… Every night when I got into bed she would say, 'Who are you?' ' He had already seen the first of that. Last week, he had walked into the kitchen and Emma had looked up from the carrots she was scraping. Her expression had been first startled, then fearful, then confused. And she had clutched Agnes's arm and asked who he was. That was something he'd have to learn to live with—like learning to live with a dagger through the heart.
He groped clumsily with his good left hand for the button to summon an attendant, found it, pressed it, glanced at his watch. Outside the glass, the light was blinding. Far to the east, a cloud was building over Tsoodzil, the Turquoise Mountain. Rain? Too early to tell, and too far east to fall on the reservation if it did develop into a thunderstorm. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and sat, slumped, waiting for the dizziness to subside, feeling an odd,, buzzing sense of detachment induced by whatever they'd given him to make him sleep.
'Well,' a voice behind him said. 'I didn't expect to find you out of bed.'
It was Dilly Streib. He was wearing his FBI summer uniform, a dark blue two-piece suit, white shirt, and necktie. On Streib, all of this managed to look slept in.
'I'm not out of bed yet,' Leaphorn said. He gestured toward the closet door. 'Look around in there and see if you can find my clothes. Then I'll be out of bed.'
Streib was holding a manila folder in his left hand. He dropped it at the foot of Leaphorn's bed and disappeared into the closet. 'Thought you'd like to take a look at that,' he said. 'Anybody tell you what happened?'
It occurred to Leaphorn that he had a headache. He took a deep breath. His lunch seemed to consist of a bowl of soup, which was steaming, a small green salad, and something including chicken which normally would have looked appetizing. But now Leaphorn's stomach felt as if it had been tilted on its side. 'I know what happened,' Leaphorn said. 'Somebody shot me in the arm.'
'I meant after that,' Streib said. He dumped Leaphorn's uniform at the foot of his bed and his boots on the floor.
'After that I'm blank,' Leaphorn said.
