Taka Ji nodded.
Mrs. Ha said something in Vietnamese, said it directly to Jim Chee and then glanced at her daughter, awaiting the translation.
“She said: ‘We have a saying in Vietnam -” Janice Ha hesitated. “I’m not sure of the word for that animal in English. Oh, yes. The saying is that fate is as gentle with men as the mongoose is with mice.”
Chee shook his head, nodded to the woman. “Would you tell your mother that Navajos say the same thing in different words. We say: ‘Coyote is always out there waiting, and Coyote is always hungry.’”
It was obvious when the elevator doors opened that federal district court was recessing for lunch. People were milling in the hallway. Janet Pete was hurrying for the elevator, directly toward him. He let her in, along with twenty or thirty other citizens. “I found Colonel Ji’s boy,” Chee told her. “I just came from talking with him.” He explained what Leaphorn had learned?that Taka Ji was the elusive painter of stone, that Taka Ji had been out on the basalt ridge the evening Delbert Nez was killed.
“You’re going to tell me that you have your witness now. That that boy saw Ashie Pinto shoot Delbert Nez.”
She was pressed against him, sideways, in the jam-packed elevator. All Chee could see was the top of her head and part of her cheek. But if he could see her face, the expression would be disappointed. He could tell that from her tone.
“No,” Chee said. “As a matter of?” The fat man with the briefcase and the Old Spice cologne leaned against his hand, causing Chee to suck in his breath. He raised the hand gingerly and held it above his head, preferring looking silly to risking the pain.
“As a matter of fact, I wanted to tell you I may have arrested the wrong man. Could you get the trial postponed a little? Maybe a few days?”
“What?” Janet said, so loudly that the buzz of competing conversations surrounding them hushed. “We shouldn’t be talking about the case in here,” she said. But then she whispered, “What did he see?”
“Before Nez got there, there were three people out there. Pinto and two other people. Maybe two other men, maybe a man and a woman.”
Janet had managed to turn herself in the crush of people about forty-five degrees?a maneuver which Chee found most pleasant?and looked up at him. Her face was full of questions. He went on, “He said Pinto sat down by a tree on the grass and was drinking from a bottle. The others climbed up in the rocks. He heard them yelling up in there, and then he heard a shot. He thought they’d killed a rattlesnake. Remember those?”
Janet’s face expressed distaste. She remembered them all too well.
“Then he heard Nez’s police car. And he left.”
Chee had his chin tucked against his chest, looking down at her. He was conscious of her faint perfume, of her hip pressed against him, of hair which smelled of high country air and sunshine. He could see her face now. But he couldn’t read her expression. It baffled him.
“You think that helps prove you caught the wrong man? Helps Hosteen Pinto?”
“Helps Hosteen Pinto? Well, sure it does. Somebody else had the pistol, or at least a gun of some kind, before Nez was shot. All Pinto had, as far as the boy could see, was the bottle. Sure it helps. It creates a reasonable doubt. Don’t you think so?”
Janet Pete had put her arms around his waist and hugged him fiercely.
“Ah, Jim,” she said. “Jim.”
And it took Chee, bandaged hand held high over his head, several seconds to realize that everyone on the elevator who faced the right way must be staring at them. And when he realized it he didn’t care. Chapter 22
TAKA JI PROVED to be as efficient at marking Jim Chee’s map as he had been plotting out his romantic signal to Jenifer Dineyahze. Chee drove almost directly to the site and found the place in the adjoining arroyo where Taka had hidden his father’s vehicle. He climbed out of his pickup and stood beside it for a moment, stretching cramped muscles and plotting the most efficient way to climb into the outcrop.
Somewhere back in those black rocks was what Professor Tagert was looking for?probably the skeleton of Butch Cassidy. There was also something that had caused Redd to change a translation to foil Tagert, something that eighty years ago had caused a stubborn Navajo to undergo a cure for exposure to witches. Back in there two biligaana bandits had probably died a long time ago. And back in there, Taka Ji last month had heard someone shoot a snake, or perhaps another human, or perhaps nothing.
Since leaving Albuquerque in the early afternoon, Chee had been racing against the weather as well as the sun. As far south as the point where Highway 44 entered the Jicarilla Reservation, he’d been conscious of the darkness on the northwestern horizon. “A slow-moving storm, this one, and that means we might get some substantial snow,” Howard Morgan had told them on the Channel 7 news. “But of course, if the jet stream moves north, it could miss most of New Mexico.” The storm had indeed moved slowly, much more slowly than the reckless seventy to eighty Chee had been pushing his pickup in defiance of law and common sense. Even so, by the time he passed the Huerfano Mesa two-thirds of the sky was black with storm and the smell of snow was in the air.
His nostrils were still full of that aroma of cold wetness as he stood beside the truck. The sun was almost on the horizon, shining through a narrow slot not closed in the west between cloud and earth. The slanting light outlined every crevasse in shadowy relief, making apparent the broken ruggedness of the ridge. It rose, ragged and tumbled shapes in black and gray, out of a long sloping hummock?what a million years or so of erosion had left of the mountain of volcanic ash that had once buried the volcano’s core. From where Chee stood there seemed to be dozens of ways up into the ridge. Most of them would dead-end at walls of lava.
He found what traces of Taka Ji’s tracks the rain that night had left and followed them?helped by the angle of the light. Then he found other tracks, easy-to-follow high-heeled cowboy boots among them. They led up into the malpais.
They led, as Chee was thinking, into Tse A’Digash. That was the term Hosteen Pinto had used?the rocks where witches gathered. There was that to think of. That, and the variety of rattlesnakes which would have been accumulating here since the first autumn cold snaps, taking advantage of a final few days of warmth from the rocks before hibernating for the winter. Maybe they would already be in hibernation. Chee doubted it. The old shamans watched such things closely. And they would not have yet started scheduling those curing rituals which could only be held when the snakes were safely asleep. Ah, well. Snakes preyed on animals small enough to be swallowed, not
