Hunting Badger

books, the dark shape of a television set.

He stepped off the end of the porch, walked around the corner, of the house and stopped at the first window. The front of a green Ford 150 pickup jutted out from behind the house. Jorie’s? Or someone else’s? Perhaps Buddy Baker. Or Ironhand. Or both. Leaphorn became abruptly conscious that he was a civilian. That he didn’t have the .38-caliber revolver he would have had with him if he was a law officer on duty. He shook his head. This uneasiness was groundless. He walked to the corner of the house. The truck was an oversize-cab model with no one visible in it. He reached through the open window and pulled down the sunshade. Clipped on it was the required liability-insurance certification in Jorie’s name. The cab was cluttered with trash, part of a newspaper, an Arby’s sandwich sack, a bent drinking straw, three red poker chips—the twenty-five-dollar denomination bearing the Ute Casino symbol—on the passenger-side seat.

Leaphorn considered the implications of that a moment, then walked back to the house, put his forehead against the glass, shaded his eyes and looked into what seemed to be a bedroom also used as an office.

Once again he heard the birdcalls, more distinct now. To his right, close to the window, a single bright spot in the darkness attracted his eye. What seemed to be a small television screen presented the image of a meadow, a pond, a shady woods, birds. His eyes adjusted to the dimness. It was a computer monitor. He was seeing the screen saver. As he looked the scene shifted to broken clouds, a formation of geese. The birdsong became honking.

Leaphorn looked away from the screen to complete a scanning of the room. He sucked in his breath. Someone was slumped in the chair in front of the computer, leaning away, against an adjoining desk. Asleep? He doubted it. The position was too awkward for sleep.

Leaphorn hurried back across the porch, opened the door, shouted, “Hello. Hello. Anyone home?” and trotted through the living room into the bedroom.

The form in the chair was a small, gray-haired man, wearing a white T-shirt with HANG UP AND DRIVE printed across the back, new-looking jeans and bedroom slippers. His left arm rested on the tabletop adjoining the computer stand, and his head rested upon it with his face illuminated by the light from the monitor. The light brightened as the screen saver presented a new set of birds. That caused the color of the blood that had seeped down from the hole above his right eye to change from almost black to a dark red.

Everett Jorie, Leaphorn thought. How long have you been dead? And how many years as a policeman does it take for me to get used to this? And understand it? And where is the person who killed you?

He stepped back from Jorie’s chair and surveyed the room, looking for the telephone and seeing it behind the computer with two stacks of the red Ute Casino chips beside it. Jorie was irrevocably dead. Calling the sheriff could wait for a few moments. First he would look around.

A pistol lay partly under the computer stand, beside the dead man’s foot—a short-barreled revolver much like the one Leaphorn had carried before his retirement. If there was a smell of burned gunpowder in the room, it was too faint for him to separate from the mixed aromas of dust, the old wool rug under his feet, mildew and the outdoor scents of hay, horse manure, sage and dry-country summer invading through the open window.

Leaphorn squatted beside the computer, took his pen from his shirt pocket, knelt, inserted it into the gun barrel, lifted the weapon and inspected the cylinder. One of the cartridges it held had been fired. He took out his handkerchief, pushed the cylinder release and swung it open. The cartridge over the chamber was also empty. Perhaps Jorie had carried the pistol with the hammer over a discharged round instead of an empty chamber, a sensible safety precaution. Perhaps he didn’t. That was something to be left to others to determine. He returned the pistol to its position beside the victim’s foot, slid out the ballpoint, then stood for a moment, holding the pen and studying the room.

It held a small, neatly made double bed. Beyond the bed, an automatic rifle leaned against the wall, an AK-47. A little table beside it held a lamp, an empty water glass and two books. One was The Virtue of Civility, with the subtitle of“Selected Essays on Liberalism.” The other lay on its back, open.

Leaphorn checked the page, used the pen to close it. The cover title read: Cato’s Letters: Essays on Liberty. He flipped the book open again, remembering it from a political science course in his undergraduate days at Arizona State. Appropriate reading for someone trying to go to sleep. The bookshelves along the wall were lined with similar fare: J.F. Cooper’s The American Democrat, Burke’s Further Reflections on the Revolution in France, Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government, de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, along with an array of political biographies, autobiographies and histories. Leaphorn extracted The Servile State from its