chocolate-frosted Twinkies. They’d go well with the coffee.
Back at the cash register, he handed the Towering House girl a five-dollar bill.
“Has Delbert Nez been in? You remember him? Sort of stocky, little mustache. Really ugly policeman.”
“I thought he was cute,” the Towering House girl said, smiling at Chee.
“Maybe you just like policemen?” Chee said. What the devil was her name?
“Not all of them,” she said. “It depends.”
“On whether they’ve arrested your boyfriend,” Chee said. She wasn’t married. He remembered Delbert had told him that. (“Why don’t you find out these things for yourself,” Delbert had said. “Before I got married, I would have known essential information like that. Wouldn’t have had to ask. My wife finds out I’m making clan checks on the chicks, I’m in deep trouble.”)
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” the Towering House girl said. “Not right now. And, no. Delbert hasn’t been in this evening.” She handed Chee his change, and giggled. “Has Delbert ever caught his rock painter?”
Chee was thinking maybe he was a little past dealing with girls who giggled. But she had large brown eyes, and long lashes, and perfect skin. Certainly, she knew how to flirt. “Maybe he’s catching him right now,” he said. “He said something on the radio about it.” He noticed she had miscounted his change by a dime, which sort of went with the giggling. “Too much money,” Chee said, handing her the dime. “You have any idea who’d be doing that painting?” And then he remembered her name. It was Shirley. Shirley Thompson.
Shirley shuddered, very prettily. “Somebody crazy,” she said.
That was Chee’s theory too. But he said: “Why crazy?”
“Well, just because,” Shirley said, looking serious for the first time. “You know. Who else would do all that work painting that mountain white?”
It wasn’t really a mountain. Technically it was probably a volcanic throatanother of those ragged upthrusts of black basalt that jutted out of the prairie here and there east of the Chuskas.
“Maybe he’s trying to paint something pretty,” Chee said. “Have you ever gone in there and taken a close look at it?”
Shirley shivered. “I wouldn’t go there,” she said.
“Why not?” Chee asked, knowing why. It probably had some local legend attached to it. Something scary. Probably somebody had been killed there and left his chindi behind to haunt the place. And it was tainted by witchcraft gossip. Delbert had been raised back in the Chuska high country west of here and he’d said something about that outcropor maybe one nearbybeing one of the places where members of the skinwalker clan were supposed to meet. It was a place to be avoidedand that was part of what had fascinated Officer Delbert Nez with its vandalism.
“It’s not just that it’s such a totally zany thing to do,” Delbert had said. “Putting paint on the side of a rocky ridge, like that. There’s a weirdness to it, too. It’s a scary place. I don’t care what you think about witches, nobody goes there. You do, somebody sees you, and they think you’re a skinwalker yourself. I think whoever’s doing it must have a purpose. Something specific. I’d like to know who the hell it is. And why.”
That had been good enough for Chee, who enjoyed his own little obsessions. He glanced at his watch. Where was Delbert now?
The door opened and admitted a middle-aged woman with her hair tied in a blue cloth. She paid for gasoline, complained about the price, and engaged Shirley in conversation about a sing-dance somebody was planning at the Newcomb school. Chee had another cup of coffee. Two teenaged boys came in, followed by an old man wearing a T-shirt with DON’T WORRY, BE HAPPY printed across the chest. Another woman came, about Shirley’s age, and the sound of thunder came through the door with her. The girls chatted and giggled. Chee looked at his watch again. Delbert was taking too damned long.
Chee walked out into the night.
The breeze smelled of rain. Chee hurried around the corner into the total darkness behind the trading post. In the car, he switched on the radio and tried to raise Nez. Nothing. He started the engine, and spun the rear wheels in an impatient start that was totally out of character for him. So was this sudden sense of anxiety. He switched on his siren and the emergency flashers.
Chee was only minutes away from the trading post when he saw the headlights approaching on Route 33. He slowed, feeling relief. But before they reached him, he saw the car’s right turn indicator blinking. The vehicle turned northward, up ahead of him, not Nez’s Navajo Tribal Police patrol car but a battered white Jeepster. Chee recognized it. It was the car of the Vietnamese (or Cambodian, or whatever he was) who taught at the high school in Ship Rock. Chee’s headlights briefly lit the driver’s face.
The rain started then, a flurry of big, widely spaced drops splashing the windshield, then a downpour. Route 33 was wide and smooth, with a freshly painted center-line to follow. But the rain was more than Chee’s wipers could handle. He slowed, listening to the water pound against the roof. Normally rain provoked jubilation in Cheea feeling natural and primal, bred into dry-country people. Now this joy was blocked by worry and a little guilt. Something had delayed Nez. He should have gone looking for him when the radio blacked out. But it was probably nothing much. Car trouble. An ankle sprained chasing his painter in the dark. Nothing serious.
Lightning illuminated the highway ahead of him, showing it glistening with water and absolutely empty. The flash lit the ragged basalt shape of the formation across the prairie to the souththe outcrop on which Nez’s vandal had been splashing his paint. Then the boom of thunder came. The rain slackened, flurried again, slackened again as the squall line of the storm passed. Off to the right Chee saw a glow of light. He stared. It came from down a dirt road that wandered from 33 southward over a ridge, leading eventually to the “outfit” of Old Lady Gorman. Chee let the breath whistle through his teeth. Relief. That would probably be Nez. Guilt fell away from him.
At the intersection, he slowed and stared down the dirt road. Headlights should be yellow. This light was red. It flickered. Fire.
“Oh, God!” Chee said aloud. A prayer. He geared the patrol car down into second and went slipping and sliding down the muddy track. Chapter 2
UNIT 44 WAS parked in the center of the track, its nose pointed toward Route 33, red flames gushing from the back of it, its tires burning furiously. Chee braked his car to a stop, skidding it out of the muddy ruts and onto the bunch grass and stunted sage. He had his door open and the fire extinguisher in his hand while the car was still
