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copter’s ladder to the tip of Ship Rock, photograph the documents in the box there, and climb back up.
“No problem, Joe,” he’d said. “Climbing down a cliff can be harder than climbing up it, but ladders are different. And I sort of like the idea of being the first guy to climb down onto the top of Ship Rock.” Liking the idea meant he wouldn’t accept any payment for taking the day off from his Gallup law practice. That appealed to Leaphorn. The copter rental was taking eight hundred dollars out of the Breedlove Corporation’s twenty thousand retainer, and Leaphorn was beginning to have some ethical qualms about how he was using that fee.
The view now was spectacular. They were flying south from the Farmington Airport and if Leaphorn had cared to look straight down, which he didn’t, he would have been staring into row after row of dragon’s teeth that erosion had formed on the east side of the uplift known as the Hogback. The rising sun outlined the teeth with shadows, making them look like a grotesquely oversized tank trap—even less hospitable than they appeared from the ground. The slanting light was also creating a silver mirror of the surface of Morgan Lake to the north and converting the long plume of steam from the stacks of the Four Corners Power Plant into a great white feather. The scale of it made even Leaphorn, a desert rat raised in the vastness of the Four Corners, conscious of its immensity.
The pilot was pointing down.
“How about having to land in those shark’s teeth?” he asked. “Or worse, parachuting down into it. Just think about that. It makes your crotch hurt.”
Leaphorn preferred to think of something else, which in its way was equally unpleasant. He thought about the oddity of murder in general, and of this murder in particular. Hal Breedlove disappears. Ten quiet years follow. Then, rapidly, in a matter of days, an unidentified skeleton is found on the mountain, apparently a man who has fallen to his death in a climbing accident. Then Amos Nez is shot. Next the bones are identified as the remains of Hal Breedlove. Then Hosteen Maryboy is murdered. Cause and effect, cause and effect. The pattern was there if he could find the missing part—the part that would bring it into focus. At the center of it, he was certain, was the great dark volcanic monolith that was now looming ahead of them like the ruins of a Gothic cathedral built for giants. On top of it a metal box was cached. In the box would be another piece to fit into the puzzle of Hal Breedlove.
“The spire on the left is it,” Rosebrough said, his voice sounding metallic through the earphones they were wearing. “They look about the same height from this vantage, but the one on the left is the one you have to stand on top of if you want to say you’ve climbed Ship Rock.”
“I’m going to circle around it a little first,” the pilot said. “I want to get a feeling for wind, updrafts, downdrafts, that sort of thing.
Air currents can be tricky around something like this. Even on a calm, cool morning.” They circled. Leaphorn had been warned about what looking down while a copter is spiraling does to one’s stomach. He folded his hands across his safety belt and studied his knuckles.
“Okay,” Rosebrough said. “That’s it just below us.”
“It doesn’t look very flat,” the pilot said, sounding doubtful. “And how big is it?”
“Not very,” Rosebrough said. “About the size of a desktop. The box is on that larger flattish area just below. I’ll have to climb down to get it.”
“You have twenty feet of ladder, but I guess I could get close enough for you to just jump down,” the pilot said.
Rosebrough laughed. “I’ll take the ladder,” he said.
And he did.
Leaphorn looked. Rosebrough was on the mountain, standing on the tiny sloping slab that formed the summit, then climbing down to the flatter area. He removed an olive drab U.S. Army ammunition box from the crack, opened it, removed the ledger, and tried to protect it from the wind produced by the copter blades. He waved them away. Leaphorn, stomach churning, resumed the study of his knuckles.
“You all right?” the pilot asked.
“Fine,” Leaphorn said, and swallowed.
“There’s a barf bag there if you need it.”
“Fine,” Leaphorn said.
“He’s taking the pictures now,” the pilot said. “Photographing one of the pages.”
“Okay,” Leaphorn said.
“It’ll just be a minute.”
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TheFallenMan
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Leaphorn, busy now with the bag, didn’t respond. But by the time the rhetorical minute had dragged itself past and Rosebrough was climbing back into the copter, he was feeling a little better.
“I took a bunch of different exposures so we’ll have some good ones,” he said, settling himself in his seat and fastening his safety belt. “And I shot the five or six pages before and after. That what you wanted?”
“Fine,” Leaphorn said, his mind working again, buzzing with the questions that had brought them up here. “Did you find Breedlove’s name? And who else—” He stopped. He was breaking his own rule. Much better to let Rosebrough tell what he had found without intervention.
“He signed it,” Rosebrough said, “and wrote ‘vita brevis.’”
He didn’t explain to Leaphorn that the inscription was Latin and provide the translation—which was one of the reasons Leaphorn liked the man. Why would Breedlove have bothered to leave that epigram? “Life is short.” Was it to explain why he’d taken the dangerous way down in case he didn’t make it? He’d worry about that later.
“Funny thing,” Rosebrough said. “No one else signed it on that date. I told you I didn’t think he could possibly
