Talking God

“That one was sort of a test,” Elkins said. “They said you couldn’t handle Petresky. I said I’d seen your work.”

“All these years,” Fleck said. “Now I need help. I think you owe me.”

“It was always business,” Eddy Elkins said. “You know that. It couldn’t be any other way. It would just be too damned dangerous.”

Dangerous for you, Fleck thought, but he didn’t say it. Instead he said: “I simply got to have three thousand. I’ve got to have enough to get my Mama moved.” Fleck paused. “Man, I’m desperate.”

There was a long silence. “You say this involves your mother?”

“Yeah.” In Joliet he had talked to Elkins a lot about Mama. He thought Elkins understood how he felt about her.

Another silence. “What’s your number there?”

Fleck told him.

“Stay there. I’ll make a contact and see what I can do.”

Fleck waited almost an hour, huddled in his damp coat in the booth and, when he felt the chill stiffening him, pacing up and down the sidewalk close enough to hear the ring.

When it rang, it was The Client.

“You dirty little hijo de puta,” he said. “You want money? You bring us nothing but trouble and you want us to pay you money for it?”

“I got to have it,” Fleck said. “You owe me.” He thought: hijo de puta; the man had called him son of a whore.

“We ought to break your dirty little neck.” The Client said. “Maybe we do that. Yes. Maybe we cut your dirty little throat. We give you a simple little job. What do you do? You screw it up!”

Fleck felt the rage rising within him, felt it like bile in his throat. He heard Mama’s voice: “They treat you like niggers. You let ’em, they treat you like dogs. You let ’em step on you, they’ll treat you like animals.”

But he choked back the rage. He couldn’t afford it. He had to pick her up right away. He had to get her to a place where they’d take care of her.

“I know who you are,” Fleck said. “I followed you back to your embassy. I get paid or I can cause you some trouble.” Then he listened.

What he heard was a stream of obscenities. He heard himself called the filthy, defecation-eating son of a whore, the son of an infected dog. And the click of the line disconnecting.

Standing in the drizzle outside the booth, Fleck spit on the sidewalk. He let the rage well up. He’d get the money another way, somehow. He’d done it in the past. Mugging. A lot of mugging to come up with three thousand dollars unless he was lucky. It was dangerous. Terribly dangerous. Only the ruling class carried big money, and some of them carried only plastic. And the police protected the ruling class. And now there was something else he had to do. It involved getting even. It involved using his shank again. It involved getting the blade in behind the bone.

Chapter Seventeen

« ^ »

What I want to know, for starters,” Joe Leaphorn said, “is everything you know about this Henry Highhawk.“

They had met in what passed for a coffee shop in Jim Chee’s hotel, surrounded by blue-collar workers and tourists who, like Chee, had asked their travel agents to find them moderately priced housing in downtown Washington. Leaphorn had donned the Washington uniform. But his three-piece suit was a model sold by the Gallup Sears store in the middle seventies, and its looseness testified to the pounds Leaphorn had lost eating his own cooking since Emma’s death.

With the single exception of his Blessing Way ceremonial, Jim Chee had never seen the legendary Leaphorn except in a Navajo Tribal Police uniform. He was having psychological trouble handling this inappropriate attire. Like a necktie on a herd bull, Chee thought. Like socks on a billy goat. But above the necktie knot Leaphorn’s eyes were exactly as Chee remembered them—dark brown, alert, searching. As always, something in them was causing Chee to examine his conscience. What had he neglected? What had he forgotten?

He told Leaphorn about Highhawk’s job, his educational background, the charge against him for vandalizing graves, his campaign to cause the Smithsonian to release its thousands of Native American skeletons for reburial. He described how he and Cowboy Dashee had arrested Highhawk. He reported how Gomez had shown up, how Gomez had agreed to post Highhawk’s bond. How yesterday Gomez had appeared at Highhawk’s house. He described Highhawk’s limp, his leg brace, and how Janet Pete had come to be his attorney. He touched on Janet Pete’s doubts about the Tano Pueblo fetish and what he had seen in Highhawk’s office-studio. But he said nothing at all about Janet Pete’s doubts and problems. That was another story. That was none of Leaphorn’s business.

“What do you think he was doing at the Yeibichai?” Leaphorn asked.

Chee shrugged. “He doesn’t look it but he’s one-fourth Navajo. One grandmother was Navajo. I guess she made a big impression on him. Janet Pete tells me he wants to be a Navajo. Thinks about himself as a Navajo.” Chee considered that some more. “He wanted to be sort of initiated into the tribe. And he knew enough about the Yeibichai to show up on the last night.” He glanced at Leaphorn. Did this Navajo version of pragmatist-agnostic know enough about the Yeibichai himself to know what that meant? He added: “When the hataalii sometimes initiates boys—lets them look through the mask. Highhawk wanted to do that.”

Leaphorn merely nodded. “Did he?”

“We arrested him,” Chee said.

Leaphorn thought about that answer. “Right away?”

Leaphorn picked up his coffee cup, examined it, looked across it at Chee, took a small sip, put it back in the