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“I want to get Leaphorn on the radio,” he said, as Bernie started the engine, “and maybe we’ll have to make a fast trip to Canyon de Chelly.”
Bernie was looking back at the house. “Do you think she will be all right?”
“I think so,” Chee said. “Ramona will take good care of her.”
“Ramona’s pretty shaken up, too,” Bernie said. “She was crying when she helped me look for the rifle. She said it was always the wrong men with Elisa—always having to take care of them. That Hal was a spoiled baby and Eldon was a bully. She said if it wasn’t for Eldon she’d be married to a good man who wanted to take care of her.”
“She say who?”
“I think it was Tommy Castro. Or maybe Kaster. Something like that. She was crying.” Bernie was staring back at the house, looking worried.
“Bernie,” Chee said. “It’s starting to snow. It’s probably going to be a bad one. Start the car. Go. Go. Go.”
“You’re worried about Amos Nez,” Bernie said, starting the engine. “We can just call the station at Chinle and have them stop any Land-Rover driving in. Bet Mr. Leaphorn already did that.”
“He said he would,” Chee said. “But I want to get a message to him about Demott taking off with his thirty- ought-six loaded. Maybe Eldon won’t be driving in. If you can climb seventeen hundred feet up Ship Rock, maybe you can climb down a six-hundred-foot cliff.”
26
THEY DROVE INTO THE FULL BRUNT
of the storm halfway between Mancos and Cortez, the wind buffeting the car and driving a blinding sheet of tiny dry snowflakes horizontally past their windshield.
“At least it’s sweeping the pavement clear,” Bernie said, sounding cheerful.
Chee glanced at her. She seemed to be enjoying the adventure. He wasn’t. His ribs hurt, so did the abrasions around his eye, and he was not in the mood for cheer.
“That won’t last long,” he said.
It didn’t. In Cortez, snow was driving over the curbs and the pavement was beginning to pack, and the broadcasts on the emergency channel didn’t sound promising. A last gasp of the Pacific hurricane system was pushing across Baja California into Arizona. There it met the first blast of Arctic air, pressing down the east slope of the Rockies from Canada. Interstate 40 at Flagstaff, where the two fronts had collided, was already closed by snow. So were highways through the Wasatch Range in Utah. Autumn was emphatically over on the Colorado Plateau.
They turned onto U.S. 666 to make the forty-mile run almost due south to Shiprock. With the icy wind pursuing them, the highway emptied of traffic by storm warnings, and speed limits ignored, Bernie outran the Canadian contribution to the storm. The sky lightened now. Far ahead, they could see where the Pacific half of the blizzard had reached the Chuska range. Its cold, wet air met the dry, warmer air on the New Mexico side at the ridgeline. The collision produced a towering wall of white fog, which poured down the slopes like a silent slow-motion Niagara.
“Wow,” Bernie said. “I never saw anything quite like that before.”
“The heavy cold air forces itself under the warmer stuff,” said Chee, unable to avoid a little showing off. “I’ll bet it’s twenty degrees colder at Lukachukai than it is at Red Rock—and they’re less than twenty miles apart.” They crossed the western corner of the Ute reservation, then roared into New Mexico and across the mesa high above Malpais Arroyo.
“Wow,” Bernie said again. “Look at that.”
Instead Chee glanced at the speedometer and flinched.
“You drive,” he said. “I’ll check the scenery for both of us.” It was worth checking. They looked down into the vast San Juan River basin—dark with storm to the right, dappled with sunlight to the left. Ship Rock stood just at the edge of the shadow line, a grotesque sunlit thumb thrust into the sky, but through some quirk of wind and air pressure, the long bulge of the Hogback formation was already mostly dark with cloud shadow.
“I think we’re going to get home before the snow,” Bernie said.
They almost did. It caught them when Bernie pulled into the parking lot at the station—but the flakes blowing against Chee as he hurried into the building were still small and dry. The Canadian cold front was still dominating the Pacific storm.
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TheFallenMan
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“You look terrible,” Jenifer said. “How do you feel?”
“I’d say well below average,” Chee said. “Did Leaphorn call?”
“Indirectly,” Jenifer said, and handed Chee three message slips and an envelope.
It was on top—a call from Sergeant Deke at the Chinle station confirming that Leaphorn had received Chee’s message about Demott leaving his ranch with his rifle. Leaphorn had gone up the canyon to the Nez place and would either bring Nez out with him or stay, depending on the weather, which was terrible.
Chee glanced at the other messages. Routine business. The envelope bore the word “Jim” in Janet’s hand. He tapped it against the back of his hand. Put it down. Called Deke.
“I’ve seen worse,” Deke said. “But it’s a bad one for this time of year. Still above zero but it won’t be for long. Blowing snow. We have Navajo 12 closed at Upper Wheatfields, and 191 between here and Ganado, and 59 north of
