questions.
“You weren’t here when Timms finally did get home?” Dashee asked.
“I was back at my house. Then the next day, a car drove up with the two FBI men in it. They asked me if I’d heard an airplane flying over. I told them what I’ve told you. They wanted to know if anybody had come around the Timms place while I was there. I said no. That was about it.”
That was about it for Dashee and Chee as well. They took a look at the barn, at the broken hasp, looked around for tracks and found nothing useful. Then they drove south through the dying red flare of twilight toward Mexican Water, where Eldon Timms had his other little place, where they dearly hoped, prayed, in fact, they would not find an L-17 hidden.
“If it’s there,” Dashee said, 'then I tell the sheriff, and he tells the FBI, and old Eldon Timms gets sent up for insurance fraud and what else? Obstruction of justice?”
“Probably,” Chee said. But he was thinking of three men, nameless, faceless, utterly unidentified, armed with automatic rifles. They had already killed a policeman, wounded another and tried to kill a third. Three killers at large in the Four Corners canyon country. He was wondering how many more would die before this thing was over.
Chapter Nine
The little map Potts had drawn for Leaphorn on a sheet of notepaper took him across the San Juan down the asphalt of Highway 35 into the Aneth Oil Field, and thence onto a dirt road which led up the slopes of Casa Del Eco Mesa. It wandered past the roofless, windowless stone buildings which Potts had said were the relics of Jorie’s ill-fated effort to run a trading post. Two dusty, bumpy miles later it brought him to the drainage that Potts had labeled Desert Creek. Leaphorn stopped there, let the dust settle a moment and looked down the slope. He saw a crooked line of pale green cottonwoods, gray-green Russian olives and silver-gray chamisa brush marking the course of the creek, the red roof of a house, a horse corral, sheep pens, a stack of hay bales protected by a vast sheet of plastic, and a windmill beside the round galvanized-metal form of the tank which received its water. Snaking down the slope along the road was a telephone line, sagging along between widely spaced poles.
Memory clicked in. He’d been there before. Now he knew why Jorie’s name had rung a bell. He’d come to this ranch at least twenty-five years ago to deal with a complaint from a rancher that Jorie was shooting at him when he flew his airplane over. Jorie had been amiable about it. He had been shooting at crows, he said, but he sure did wish that Leaphorn would tell the fellow that flying so low over his place bothered his cattle. And apparently that had ended that—just another of the thousands of jobs rural policemen get solving little social problems among people turned eccentric by an overdose of dramatic skyscapes, endless silence and loneliness.
Leaphorn fished his binoculars from the glove box for a closer look. Nothing much had changed. The windmill tower now also supported what seemed to be an antenna, which meant Jorie—like many empty-country ranchers living beyond the reach of even Rural Electrification Administration power lines—had invested in radio communication. And the windmill was also rigged to turn a generator to provide the house with some battery-stored electricity. A little green tractor, dappled with rust and equipped with a front-end loader, was parked in the otherwise-empty horse corral. No other vehicle was visible, which didn’t mean one wasn’t sitting somewhere out of sight.
Leaphorn found himself surprised by this. He’d expected to see a pickup, or whatever Jorie drove, parked by the house and Jorie working on something by one of the outbuildings. He’d expected to confirm that Jorie had not flown away with the Ute Casino loot and that Gershwin had been using him in some sort of convoluted scheme. He leaned back on the truck seat, stretched out his legs, and thought the whole business through again. A waste of time? Probably. How about dangerous? He didn’t think so, but he’d have an explanation for this visit handy if Jorie came to the door and invited him in. He shifted the truck back into gear, drove slowly down the slope, parked under the cotton wood nearest the front porch and waited a few moments for his arrival to be acknowledged.
Nothing happened. No one appeared at the front door to note his arrival. He listened and heard nothing. He got out of the truck, closed the door carefully and silently, and walked toward the house, up the stone front steps, and tapped his knuckles against the doorframe. No response. A faint sound. Or had he imagined it?
“Hello,” Leaphorn shouted. “Anyone home?”
No answer. He knocked again. Then stood, ear to the door, listening. He tried the knob, gently. Not locked, which wasn’t surprising and didn’t necessarily mean Jorie was home. Locking doors in this empty country was considered needless, fruitless and insulting to one’s neighbors. If a thief wanted in, it would be about as easy to break the glass and climb in through a window.
But what was he hearing now?
A dim, almost imperceptible high note. Repeated. Repeated. Then a different sound. Something like a whistle. Birdsong? Now a bit of the music meadow-larks make at first flight. Leaphorn moved down the porch to a front window, shaded the glass with his hands and peered in. He looked into a dark room, cluttered with furniture, rows of shelved
