“It’s easier to walk,” she said. “Especially easier on my poor car.”
It wasn’t quite as easy as it looked. As with all large objects seen through the thin, dry, high desert air, the outcrop was bigger and more distant than it seemed. The sun had dipped well below the horizon when they climbed the steep final slope toward its base. Overhead the high clouds had faded from rose to dark red. Far to the west across Arizona, clouds over the Kaibito Plateau were blue-black, outlined by fiery yello’tv.
Janet stopped to stare.
“Did you miss these sunsets in Washington?” Chee asked.
“I’m looking at that car,” she said, pointing.
Pulled behind a clump of junipers was a dark green Ford Bronco II, dirty, dented, and several years old. They detoured to walk behind it. It wore a New Mexico vanity license plate.
“REDDNEK,” Janet read. “You think the irony was intended?”
Chee shrugged. He didn’t catch the irony. The vehicle was empty. What was it doing here? Where was the driver?
“A redneck who can’t spell it,” she explained.
“Oh.”
On the ridge beyond the vehicle, Janet stopped again. She stood, head tilted back, staring up at the massive, unbroken slab of basalt which confronted them here.
“I don’t see any sign of paint,” Janet said. The red light changed the color of her shirt, and her faded jeans, and her face. Her hair was disheveled, her expression intent, and, taken all together, she looked absolutely beautiful to Jim Chee. It would be a lot better, he thought, if friends didn’t look like that.
“Let’s see if we can find where he climbed up,” he said.
That wasn’t easy. The first upward possibility dead-ended on a shelf that led absolutely nowhere except up a vertical face of stone. The second, a pathway that opened inside a split in a basaltic slab, took them perhaps seventy-five yards upward and in before it finally dwindled away into an impossibly narrow crack. They found the third atop a sloping hump of debris by ducking under a tilted roof of fallen stone.
“I haven’t brought up the subject of snakes,” Janet said. She was brushing the dirt from her hands on her pant legs. “If I do, I hope you’ll try to say something positive.”
“Okay,” Chee said. He thought for a minute, catching his breath. “If you like snakes, this is a fine example of the places you come to find them.”
“I don’t like snakes,” Janet said. “I know all that BS about Navajos and snakes being friends, but I don’t like them. They scare me.”
“We’re not supposed to be friends,” Chee said. “The way it goes in the legend, First Man and Big Snake learned to respect one another. The way you do that is by not putting your hand, or your foot, or any other part of you where you can’t see. That way you don’t step on your little brother, or sit on him, or poke him in the eye. And in return, he buzzes his rattlers to tell you if you’re getting in dangerous territory. Very efficient.”
“I still don’t like them,” Janet said, but she was staring up into the formation. “Look. I think that’s paint.”
It was. Above them and to their left, Chee could see a face of the basalt cliff reflecting white. Reaching it involved climbing up a deep crack into a long, narrow pocket. But eons of erosion had filled it with enough fallen rocks and blown dust to form a floor. There Chee leaned against the stone, breathing hard, the bottom level of the paint just above his head.
“Look here,” Janet said. She was kneeling on the dirt. “Can you believe this? I think somebody carried a ladder in here.”
If Janet was breathing hard it didn’t show. But Chee was, and was embarrassed by it. It was being out of shape, he thought. Too long in the hospital bed. Too many weeks without exercise. Climbing with one hand in a bandage hadn’t been easy. He would have to get back into doing some exercises.
He took a long, deep breath and squatted beside her. Two narrow, rectangular shapes had been pressed into the earth, the proper distance apart to have been made by the feet of a ladder.
“A determined painter,” Janet said. “With a plan, obviously. Why else haul a ladder up in here? He had to know he was going to be reaching up somewhere where he’d need it.”
Chee was examining the holes the ladder had left. He was wishing they’d climbed in here when the light was better.
“I think that’s interesting,” Janet said.
He stood and brushed off his jeans with his good hand, wondering if Nez actually caught the son-of-a-bitch. Did Nez chase him? Did he even know Nez was after him?
“Did this crazy rock painter kill Nez?” Janet asked.
“Ashie Pinto shot Nez in the chest,” Chee said. “But did this nutty rock painter have anything to do with it? Did he see it happen?”
“He seems nutty all right,” Janet said. She had climbed halfway out of the pocket and was staring up into the broken, slanted wilderness of slabs, crags, boulders, and cliffs of the upthrust. “You can see several painted places back in there. One big squarish place, and a narrow vertical strip and some other small places.”
Chee climbed up beside her.
“If he saw it happen, and I can find him, then you could just plead Pinto guilty,” Chee said. “No use letting it go to trial. Just make a deal for him.”
Janet let it pass, staring up into the formation. “Odd,” she said.
“It doesn’t seem to form any pattern,” Chee agreed. “Or communicate anything or make any sense.” With his knife, he scraped at the painted stone where they were standing, collecting a sample from the lower edge of the
