dancers, big as life. Apparently some sort of American Indians. Fleck stooped, slipped the shank out of his boot, and held it in his palm, the honed blade hidden by his sleeve. Then he waited. He wanted the crowd to be exactly big enough. He wanted the time to be exactly right.
Chapter Twenty-One
« ^ »
This Miguel Santero, was that his name? This guy with the mutilated hands, did you see any sign of him around here last night?“
Leaphorn was standing exactly in front of the vertical line formed by the junction of the elevator doors, staring at the crack as he asked the question. It seemed to Chee that the elevator was barely moving. Why hadn’t they looked for the stairs? Six flights. They could have run down six flights while this incredibly slow elevator was dropping one.
“I didn’t see him,” Chee said. “I just had a feeling that it was Santero on the telephone.”
“I wish we knew for sure how he connects,” Leaphorn said, without relaxing his stare at the elevator door. “Three slim threads is all we have—or maybe four—tying him to the Santillanes bunch. The FBI connects him, but the FBI has a bad habit of buying bad information. Second, after Santillanes was killed going to find Highhawk, Santero went out and found him. Maybe that was just a coincidence. Third, the little red-headed man who killed Santillanes seems to have been following Santero too.“
The elevator’s floor indicator passed three and sank toward two. Leaphorn watched it. He got Chee to explain how the displays were arranged. He told Chee what he’d seen in the
“What’s the fourth?” Chee said.
Leaphorn’s mind had left this part of the puzzle to explore something else. “Fourth?”
“You said maybe four thin threads.”
“Oh. The fourth. Santero’s mangled hands and Santillanes’ teeth. They were broken out, I think. The pathologist said there was nothing wrong with the man’s gums.” He looked at Chee. “I think that’s what decides me. Santero is one of the Santillanes people. The FBI had this one right. Describe him to me again.”
Chee described Bad Hands in detail.
“What do you think we’re dealing with here?”
“I’d guess a bomb,” Chee said.
Leaphorn nodded. “Probably,” he said. “Plastic explosive in the mask, and someone there to detonate it when the general is in exactly the right place.”
The elevator creaked to a halt at the ground floor.
“I’ll get the mask,” Chee said. “You look for Santero.”
Finding Santero proved to be no problem.
They rushed out of the elevator, through the door into the museum’s main-floor public display halls and down the corridor toward the MASKED GODS OF THE AMERICAS banner—Chee leading, Leaphorn puffing along behind. Chee stopped.
“There he is,” he said.
Santero had his back to them. He was standing beside an exhibit of Toltec masks, watching the crowd, which was watching television crews at another exhibit. Bright lights flashed on—a television crew preparing for action.
Chee turned his hurried walk into a run, dodging through the spectators, staggering a teenaged girl who backed into his path, being staggered in turn by a hefty woman whose shoulder grazed him as he passed. The Yeibichai itself had drawn only a few lookers. Curiosity about the television crews and the celebrity at the Incan display was the magnet but Chee had to push his way through the overflow to reach the exhibit. He was forcing himself not to think two terrible, unthinkable thoughts. He would reach the mask and there would be a bomb under it and Bad Hands would detonate it in his face. He would reach the mask and tear it off and there would be nothing under it. Only the molded plastic head of the manikin. In the first thought he would be instantly dead. In the second he would be hideously, unspeakably, terminally humiliated—living out his life as a public joke.
“Hey!” he heard behind him. “Get away from that. What the hell are you doing!” A security guard was climbing over the railing.
Chee jerked at the mask, tilting the manikin against him. He jerked again. The mask, the head, all of it came off in his arms. The headless manikin toppled with a crash. “Hey!” the guard shouted.
Leroy Fleck had several terrible weaknesses and several terrible strengths. One of his strengths was in stalking his prey, attaining the exact place, the exact time, the exact position, for using his shank exactly as Eddy Elkins— and his own subsequent experience—had taught him to use it. The secret of Leroy Fleck’s survival had been finding a way to make his kill instant and silent. And Fleck had managed to survive seventeen years since his release from prison.
He was stalking now. While he watched the crowd and waited for the moment, he slipped the shank out of his sleeve and an envelope out of his pocket. He put the shank in the envelope, and carried it in his right hand, deep in his right coat pocket where it would be ready. The envelope had been Elkins’ idea. “If witnesses see an envelope, they react like they’re seeing somebody handing somebody a letter. Same with the victim. But if people see a knife coming, it’s a totally different reaction.” That had been proved true. And the paper didn’t get in the way at all, or slow things down. With the handle of the shank ready between his thumb and forefinger, he watched The Client carefully, and the VIP, and the VIP’s muscleman, and the ambassador, and the rest of them. He concluded from the way the man moved, and the way he watched, that the still photographer was also the ambassador’s bodyguard. Partially on the basis of that he had changed his strategy. The VIP would go first. The Client second. The VIP was the one that mattered, the one who would best demonstrate that Leroy Fleck was a man, and not a dog that could be spit on without retribution.
He could do it right now, he thought, but the situation was improving. It became clear to Fleck what was happening. The VIP had called some sort of press conference here at the Incan display. That brought in the television cameras, and TV crews attracted the curious. The bigger the crowd got, the better the odds for Fleck. It
