sympathetic but had questions to be answered. For example, where was Nakai’s wife, whose name, but not her signature, was on the admissions form? By what authority were they taking Mr Nakai off the life-support systems and out of the hospital? The doctor who had admitted Mr Nakai had left for Albuquerque. That shifted responsibility to another doctor—now busy in the emergency room downstairs patching up a knifing victim. He arrived on the floor thirty minutes and two paging calls later, looking young and tired.
“What’s this about?” he asked, and the nurse provided a fill-in that caused him to look doubtful. Meanwhile, the ambulance attendant emerged from the elevator, recognized Chee from working traffic accidents and asked him for instructions.
“I can’t do it,” the doctor said. “The patient’s on life support. We need authorization from the next of kin. Lacking that, the admitting physician needs to sign him out.”
“That’s not really the question,” Chee said. “We are taking Hosteen Nakai home tonight to be with his wife. Our question is how you can help us do this to minimize the trouble it might cause.”
That produced a chilly but brief silence followed by the signing by Chee of a Released Against Advice of Physician form and a financial responsibility statement. Then Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai was free again.
Chee rode in the back of the ambulance with Nakai and the emergency medical technician.
“I guess you heard they got one of those casino bandits,” the tech said. “It was on the six o’clock news.”
“No,” Chee said. “What happened?”
“The guy shot himself,” the tech said. “It was that fella that used to have a radio talk show. Sort of a right’winger. News said he ran cattle up there south of Aneth. Married a Navajo woman and was using her grazing allotment up there.”
“Shot himself? What’d they say about that?”
“Not much. It was at his house. I guess they were closing in on him, and he didn’t want to get arrested. Fella named Everett Jorie. And now they know who the other two were. Said they’re both from up there in Utah. Part of one of those militia bunches.”
“Jorie,” Chee said. “Never heard of him.”
“He used to have a talk show on the radio. You know, all the nuts calling in and complaining about the government.”
“OK. I remember him now.”
“And they have the other two identified now. Man named George Ironhand and one named Buddy Baker. I think Ironhand’s a Ute. Anyway, they said he used to work at the Ute Casino.”
“I wonder how they got them identified.”
“The TV said the FBI did it, but it didn’t say how.”
“Well, hell,” Chee said. “I was hoping they’d catch them in Los Angeles, or Tulsa, or Miami, or anyplace a long ways from this place.”
The ambulance tech chuckled. “You’re not anxious to go prowling around in those canyons again. I wouldn’t be, either.”
Chee let that pass into silence.
Then Hosteen Nakai sighed, and said, “Ironhand.” And sighed again.
Chee leaned over him, and said, “Little Father. Are you all right?”
“Ironhand,” Nakai said. “Be careful of him. He was a witch.”
“A witch? What did he do?”
But Hosteen Nakai seemed to be sleeping again.
Chapter Eleven
The half-moon was dipping behind the mountains to the west when the ambulance, with Bernie trailing it in Chee’s truck, rolled down the track and stopped outside Hosteen Nakai’s sheep-camp place in the Chuskas. Blue Woman was standing in the doorway waiting. She ran out to greet them, crying. At first the tears were for grief, thinking they were bringing home her husband’s body. Then she cried for joy.
They put him on his bed beside a pinion tree, rearranged his oxygen supply and listened to Blue Woman’s tearful explanation of how Hosteen Nakai had come to be abandoned, as she saw it, in the Farmington hospital. Her niece had come to take her to have an infected tooth removed, and to replenish the supply of the medicine which kept away the pain and let her husband sleep. Nakai had been much better, had wanted to come along and there had been no one to look after him at the sheep camp. But at the dentist’s office he had fainted, someone called 911, and an ambulance took him to the hospital. She had waited there, and waited, not knowing what to do for him, and finally her niece had to go to care for her children, and she had to go with her. There were stories that the rich young people from the cities were putting wolves back in the mountains, and there was no one at their place to protect
