'I'd hire you,' Chee said. 'Pay you for using your horses. Good money.'
'No,' Whistler said. 'I'm a Christian now. I know about Jesus. I don't worry about Anasazi ghosts like I did when I was a pagan. Before I walked on the Jesus Road. But I won't go into that place.'
'Good money,' Chee said. 'No problems with the law.'
'I heard him in there,' Whistler said. He took two steps away from Chee, toward the hogan door. 'I heard the Watersprinkler playing his flute.'
Chapter Fourteen
T ^ t
LEAPHORN MANAGED a forward seat by the window when he changed planes in Chicago. There was nothing to see -- just the topside of solid cloud cover over the great flat, fertile American heartland. Leaphorn looked down at this gray mass and thought of the river of wet air flowing up from the Gulf of Mexico, and of cold rain, and bleak, featureless landscapes closed in by a sky no more than six feet above one's forehead. At least Emma had saved them from that by holding him on the reservation.
He was depressed. He had done what he had gone to do and achieved nothing useful. All he knew that he hadn't known before was that Et-citty had been too smart to sign a pot documentation admitting a violation of federal law. Leaphorn was fairly sure that the physical description of the site must be accurate. He could think of no reason for Etcitty to have made up such a complicated description. It seemed to flow from memory. An unsophisticated man following the form's instructions, describing reality with the single lie to avoid incrimination. That helped very little. The Utah-Arizona-New Mexico border country was a maze of washes, gulches, draws, and canyons. Thousands of them, and in their sheltered, sun-facing alcoves, literally scores of thousands of Anasazi sites. He'd seen an estimate of more than a hundred thousand such sites on the Colorado Plateau, built over a period of almost a thousand years. What Etcitty had given him was like a description of a house in a big city with no idea of its street address. He could narrow it down some. Probably in southern Utah or extreme northern Arizona. Probably north of Monument Valley. Probably east of Nokaito Mesa. Probably west of Montezuma Creek. That narrowed it to an area bigger than Connecticut, occupied by maybe five thousand humans. And all he had was a site description that might be as false as its location obviously was.
Perhaps Chee had done better. An odd young man, Chee. Smart, apparently. Alert. But slightlya?S slightly what? Bent? Not exactly. It wasn't just the business of trying to be a medicine man--a following utterly incongruous with police work. He was a romantic, Leaphorn decided. That was it. A man who followed dreams. The sort who would have joined that Paiute shaman who invented the ghost dance and the vision of white men withering away and the buffalo coming back to the plains. Maybe that wasn't fair. It was more that Chee seemed to think an island of 180,000 Navajos could live the old way in a white ocean. Perhaps 20,000 of them could, if they were happy on mutton, cactus, and pinon nuts. Not practical. Navajos had to compete in the real world. The Navajo Way didn't teach competition. Far from it.
But Chee, odd as he was, would find Slick Nakai. Another dreamer, Nakai. Leaphorn shifted in the narrow seat, trying vainly for comfort. Chee would find Nakai and Chee would get from Nakai about as much information as Leaphorn would have been able to extract.
Leaphorn found himself thinking of what he would say to Emma about Chee. He shook his head, picked up a New Yorker, and read. Dinner came. His seatmate examined it scornfully. To Leaphorn, who had been eating his own cooking, it tasted great. They were crossing the Texas panhandle now. Below, the clouds were thinning, breaking into patches. Ahead, the earth rose like a rocky island out of the ocean of humid air that blanketed the midlands. Leaphorn could see the broken mesas of eastern New Mexico. Beyond, on the western horizon, great cloud-castle thunderheads, unusual in autumn, rose into the stratosphere. Leaphorn felt something he hadn't felt since Emma's death. He felt a kind of joy.
Something like that mood was with him when he awoke the next morning in his bed at Window Rock--a feeling of being alive, and healthy, and interested. He was still weary. The flight from Albuquerque to Gallup in the little Aspen Airways Cessna, and the drive from Gallup, had finished what reserves he had left. But the depression was gone. He cooked bacon for breakfast and ate it with toast and jelly. While he was eating the telephone rang.
Jim Chee, he thought. Who else would be calling him?
It was Corporal Ellison Billy, who handled things that needed handling for Major Nez, who was more or less Leaphorn's boss.
'There's a Utah cop here looking for you,' Billy said. 'You available?'
Leaphorn was surprised. 'What's he want? And what kind of cop?'
'Utah State Police. Criminal Investigation Division,' Billy said. 'He just said he wants to talk to you. About a homicide investigation. That's all I know. Probably told the major more. You coming in?'
Homicide, he thought. The depression sagged down around him again. Someone had found Eleanor Friedman- Bernal's body. 'Tell him ten minutes,' he said, which was the time it took for him to drive from his house among the pinons on the high side of Window Rock to police headquarters beside the Fort Defiance Highway.
The desk had two messages for him. One from Jim Chee was short: 'Found Nakai near Mexican Hat with a friend who says ruins is located in what the locals call Watersprinkler Canyon west of his place. I will stay reachable through the Shiprock dispatcher.'
The other, from the Utah State Police, was shorter. It said: 'Call Detective McGee re: Houk. Urgent.'
'Houk?' Leaphorn said. 'Any more details?'
'That's it,' the dispatcher said. 'Just call McGee about Houk. Urgent.'
He put the message in his pocket.
The door to the major's office was open. Ronald Nez was standing behind his desk. A man wearing a blue windbreaker and a billed cap with the legend LIMBER ROPE on the crown sat against the wall. He got up when Leaphorn walked in, a tall man, middle-aged, with a thin, bony face. Acne or some other scarring disease had left cheeks and forehead pocked with a hundred small craters. Nez introduced them. Carl McGee was the name. He had not waited for a call back.
'I'll get right to it,' McGee said. 'We got a homicide case, and he left you a note.'
Leaphorn kept his face from showing his surprise. It wasn't Friedman-Bernal.
McGee waited for a response.
Leaphorn nodded.
