often enough I’d forget and tell the truth.”
This notion didn’t seem to bother Nez. He motioned Leaphorn to sit on the boulder beside his chair.
“Now you want to talk to me about who’d want to shoot me. I tell you one thing right now. It wasn’t no car burglars. That’s a lot of lies they’re saying about me.”
Leaphorn nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “The police at Chinle told me you weren’t helping them catch those people.” Nez seemed pleased at that. He nodded.
“But you know, maybe the car burglars don’t know that,” Leaphorn said. “Maybe they think you’re telling on ’em.” Nez shook his head. “No,” he said. “They know better. They’re my kinfolks.”
“You picked a good place to get some sunshine here,” Leaphorn said. “Lots of heat off the cliff. Out of the wind. And—” Nez laughed. “And nobody can get a shot at me here. Not from the rim anyway.”
“I noticed that,” Leaphorn said.
“I figured you had.”
“I read the police report,” Leaphorn said, and recited it to Nez. “That about right?”
“That’s it,” Nez said. “The son of a bitch just kept shooting. After I sort of crawled under the horse, he hit the horse twice more.” Nez whacked his hand against the cast. “Thump. Thump.”
“Sounds like he wanted to kill you,” Leaphorn said.
“I thought maybe he just didn’t like my horse,” Nez said. “He was a pretty sorry horse. Liked to bite people.”
“The last time I came to see you it was also bad news,” Leaphorn said. “You think there could be any connection?”
“Connection?” Nez said. He looked genuinely surprised. “No. I didn’t think of that.” But he thought now, staring at Leaphorn, frowning. “Connection,” he repeated. “How could there be? What for?” Leaphorn shrugged. “I don’t know. It was just a thought. Did anybody tell you our missing man from way back then has turned up?”
“No,” Nez said, looking delighted. “I didn’t know that. After a month or so I figured he must be dead. Didn’t make any sense to leave that pretty woman that way.”
“You were right. He was dead. We just found his bones,” Leaphorn said, and watched Nez, waiting for the question. But no question came.
“I thought so,” Nez said. “Been dead a long time, too, I bet.”
“Probably more than ten years,” Leaphorn said.
“Yeah,” Nez said. He shook his head, said, “Crazy bastard,” and looked sad.
Leaphorn waited.
“I liked him,” Nez said. “He was a good man. Funny. Lots of jokes.”
“Are you going to play games with me like you did eleven years ago, or you going to tell me what you know about this? Like why you think he was crazy and why you thought he’d been dead all this time.” 20 of 102
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“I don’t tell on people,” Nez said. “There’s already plenty of trouble without that.”
“There won’t be any more trouble for Harold Breedlove,” Leaphorn said. “But from the look of all those bandages, there’s been some trouble for you.”
Nez considered that. Then he considered Leaphorn.
“Tell me if you found him on Ship Rock,” Nez said. “Was he climbing Tse? Bitai??” Absolutely nothing Amos Nez could have said would have surprised Leaphorn more than that. He spent a few moments re-collecting his wits.
“That’s right,” he said finally. “Somebody spotted his skeleton down below the peak. How the hell did you know?” Nez shrugged.
“Did Breedlove tell you he was going there?”
“He told me.”
“When?”
Nez hesitated again. “He’s dead?”
“Dead.”
“When I was guiding them,” Nez said. “We were way up Canyon del Muerto. His woman, Mrs. Breedlove, she’d gone up a little ways around the corner. To urinate, I guess it was. Breedlove, he’d been talking about climbing the cliff there.” He gestured upward.
“You been up there. It’s straight up. Worse than that. Some places the top hangs over. I said nobody could do it. He said he could.
He told me some places he’d climbed up in Colorado. He started talking then about all the things he wanted to do while he was still young and now he was already thirty years old and he hadn’t done them. And then he said—” Nez cut it off, looking at Leaphorn.
“I’m not a policeman anymore,” he said. “I’m retired, like you. I just want to know what the hell happened to the man.”
“Maybe I should have told you then,” Nez said.
