'You have anything else to go on?'
'Oh,' Chee said. 'Sure. We knew he rented a truck with new tires on double back wheels.'
'Okay,' Leaphorn said. 'Good. So there were tracks to look for.' Now his voice sounded more relaxed. 'Makes a lot of difference. Otherwise you spend the rest of your life out there running down the roads.'
'And I figured he might be out digging last night because of something he said to Slick Nakai. The preacher bought pots from him, now and then. And he sort of told the preacher he'd have some for him quick,' Chee said.
Silence.
'Did you know I'm on leave? Terminal leave?'
'I heard it,' Chee said.
'Ten more days and I'm a civilian. Right now, matter of fact, I guess I'm unofficial.'
'Yes sir,' Chee said.
'If you can make it tomorrow, would you drive out there to the site with me? Look it over with me in daylight. Tell me how it was before the sheriffs people and the ambulance and the FBI screwed everything up.'
'If it's okay with the captain,' Chee said, 'I'd be happy to go.'
Chapter Eight
T ^ t
LEAPHORN HAD BEEN AWARE of the wind most of the night, listening to it blow steadily from the southeast as he waited for sleep, awakening again and again to notice it shifting, and gusting, making chindi sounds around the empty house. It was still blowing when Thatcher arrived to pick him up, buffeting Thatcher's motor pool sedan.
'Cold front coming through,' Thatcher said. 'It'll die down.'
And as they drove northward from Window Rock it moderated. At Many Farms they stopped for breakfast, Thatcher reminiscing about Harrison Houk, cattleman, pillar of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, potent Republican, subject of assorted gossip, county commissioner, holder of Bureau of Land Management grazing permits sprawling across the southern Utah canyon country, legendary shrewd operator. Leaphorn mostly listened, remembering Houk from long ago, remembering a man stricken. When they paid their check, the western sky over Black Mesa was bleak with suspended dust but the wind was down. Fifty miles later as they crossed the Utah border north of Mexican Water, it was no more than a breeze, still from the southeast but almost too faint to stir the sparse gray sage and the silver cheat grass of the Nokaito Bench. The sedan rolled across the San Juan River bridge below Sand Island in a dead calm. Only the smell of dust recalled the wind.
'Land of Little Rain,' Thatcher said. 'Who called it that?'
It wasn't the sort of friendship that needed answers. Leaphorn looked upstream, watching a small flotilla of rubber kayaks, rafts, and wooden dories pushing into the stream from the Sand Island launching site. A float expedition down into the deep canyons. He and Emma had talked of doing that. She would have loved it, getting him away from any possibility of telephone calls. Getting him off the end of the earth. And he would have loved it, too. Always intended to do it but there was never enough time. And now, of course, the time was all used up.
'One of your jobs?' Leaphorn asked, nodding toward the flotilla below.
'We license them as tour boatmen. Sell `em trip permits, make sure they meet the safety rules. So forth.' He nodded toward the stream. 'That must be the last one of the season. They close the river down just about now.'
'Big headache?'
'Not this bunch,' Thatcher said. 'This is Wild Rivers Expeditions out of Bluff. Pros. More into selling education. Take you down with a geologist to study the formations and the fossils, or with an anthropologist to look at the Anasazi ruins up the canyons, or maybe with a biologist to get you into the lizards and lichens and the bats. That sort of stuff. Older people go. More money. Not a bunch of overaged adolescents hoping to get scared shitless going down the rapids.'
Leaphorn nodded.
'Take great pride in cleaning up after themselves. The drill now is urinate right beside the river, so it dilutes it fast. Everything else they carry out. Portable toilets. Build their camp fires in fireboxes so you don't get all that carbon in the sand. Even carry out the ashes.'
They turned upriver toward Bluff. Off the reservation now. Out of Leaphorn's jurisdiction and into Thatcher's. Much of the land above the bluffs lining the river would be federal land -- public domain grazing leases. The land along the river had been homesteaded by the Mormon families who'd settled this narrow valley on orders from Brigham Young to form an outpost against the hostile Gentile world. This stony landscape south of the river had been Leaphorn's country once, when he was young and worked out of Kayenta, but it was too waterless and barren to support the people who would require police attention.
History said 250 Mormons had settled the place in the 1860s, and the last census figures Leaphorn had seen showed its current population was 240--three service stations strung along the highway, three roadside cafes, two groceries, two motels, the office and boathouse of Wild Rivers Expeditions, a school, a ward meetinghouse, and a scattering of houses, some of them empty. The years hadn't changed much at Bluff.
Houk's ranch house was the exception. Leaphorn remembered it as a big, solid block of a building, formed of cut pink sandstone, square as a die and totally neat. It had been connected to the gravel road from Bluff by a graded dirt driveway, which led through an iron gate, curved over a sagebrush-covered rise, and ended under the cottonwoods that shaded the house. Leaphorn noticed the difference at the gate, painted then, rusted now. He unlatched it, refastened it after Thatcher drove through. Then he pulled the chain, which slammed the clapper against the big iron church bell suspended on the pole that took the electric line to the house. That told Houk he had visitors.
The driveway now was rutted, with a growth of tumbleweeds, wild asters, and cheat grass along the tracks. The rabbit fence, which Leaphorn remembered surrounding a neat and lush front yard garden, was sagging now and the garden a tangle of dry country weeds. The pillars that supported the front porch needed paint. So did the pickup truck parked beside the porch. Only the solid square shape of the house, built to defy time, hadn't been changed by the years. But now, surrounded by decay, it stood like a stranger. Even the huge barn on the slope behind it,
