The snake tested the air with its tongue, didn’t like the human aroma it detected, and began readjusting its coil. The tip of its tail emerged. It rattled.
“Hohzho,” Chee said. He withdrew hand and stick and looked around, seeking something more suitable for extracting the saddlebags.
Then he noticed drag marks.
They were fresh. Something large and heavy had been pulled across the sandy space to his left and into the rocks.
Chee followed. He turned the corner.
William Odell Redd was standing there. He had an oversized revolver in his hand, pointing more or less at Chee’s knees. And there, at Redd’s feet, was the body of a small man, face up, as if Redd had dragged him by the shoulders.
“I wish you hadn’t come back here,” Redd said.
Chee thought, So do I. But he said: “What are you doing here?”
“I came after some things of mine,” Redd said. “I guessed you’d be coming. I was going to be gone before you got here.”
“I guess Jean Jacobs mentioned it to you,” Chee said.
“A great girl,” Redd said. “Really.”
“I thought so too.”
Redd was looking down at Tagert. “He treated her like dirt,” Redd said. “He treated everybody like dirt. The son-of-a-bitch.”
“Is that why you shot him?”
“No,” Redd said, still looking down at the professor. “Probably should have. Long ago.”
Chee was looking at the pistol. It looked about a hundred years old. It probably was. Probably it had come from the holster of Butch Cassidy, or whoever the bandit turned out to be. What mattered was whether it would still work. It looked ancient and dusty. But not rusty. It was cocked. The hammer had gone backward so it would probably come forward. Fast enough to detonate the cartridge? Maybe. Would the cartridge still be good after all these years? It seemed doubtful, but this arid climate preserved almost everything. Taka had heard a shot up here. This pistol? Shooting Professor Tagert? Chee found it difficult to think of anything but what Redd planned to do with the weapon. But he didn’t want to ask..
It was snowing now. Small dry flakes drifted in, hanging in the air, disappearing. Chee found his mind working in an odd way. It had deduced why Colonel Ji had been killed, which was not at this moment a high-priority question. He and Janet had talked about Ji in Redd’s house, about Ji being the owner of the car seen leaving this area after Nez’s death. Redd must have seen it that night, too. Must have presumed the murder of Tagert had been observed. Must have gone to Ship Rock and killed Ji as soon as he’d learned from them (or thought he had learned) the identity of the witness. And killed the wrong person. But there was no right person. Taka hadn’t seen the killing either.
Now, suddenly, Chee saw how this information might be useful. If he could be subtle enough. He said:
“Did you see the boy in here that night? The boy who was painting the rocks?”
“What boy?” Redd looked surprised.
“The Ship Rock High School boy,” Chee said. “He saw your car in here. Saw you with Hosteen Pinto and,” Chee glanced at the body, “with the professor. Climbing up here. The two of you, he said. Not Pinto. He said Pinto stayed behind and got drunk.”
Redd looked stricken. “It was the math teacher,” he said. “Not a boy.”
“We were wrong about that. It wasn’t the math teacher. It was a high school kid.”
“Ah, shit,” Redd said. “Ah, shit.” He leaned back against the rock. “So they’ll be after me, then. No matter what.”
“Best thing would be to turn yourself in,” Chee said.
Redd wasn’t listening. He was shaking his head. “Weird,” he said. “Weird. The way this all started.”
“How did it?”
“I was just going to squeeze a thousand bucks out of the old bastard. Just what he owed me for the overtime he was always working me and not paying me for.”
“By holding out part of the translation?” Chee asked. “You knew he wanted to find this place. These dead cowboys, or whoever.”
“Butch Cassidy,” Redd said, absently.
“Yeah. I left that part of the story out. The part that located this place. Then I told Tagert that since I know Navajo and can talk to people I’d be able to find it. He gave me a five-hundred-dollar advance.” Redd looked up at Chee, and laughed. “I found this ridge all right. That was easy enough with the details Pinto had in his story. But I couldn’t find this spot. The son-of-a-bitch wanted his money back. Then I got the idea of hiring Pinto. As a crystal gazer, you know. Sometimes that works, I heard, especially if the shaman knows something he’s not telling.”
“So Pinto found it for you?”
“We brought him here. He looked in his crystals. Put ‘em on the ground, used pollen, did some chanting and looked into them and told us where to climb up into here. He was very vague about it at first but Tagert poured the whiskey into him. Loosened him up.”
“So why did you kill Tagert? He wouldn’t give you the other five hundred bucks?”
