“Where’s your weapon?” Leaphorn asked. “You need to hand that over to Sergeant Chee here.”
“I threw it away,” Gershwin said. “I never had shot a man before, and when I realized what I’d done I just felt sick. Went to that side door over there and threw up and then I threw my pistol down in the canyon.”
They had moved out through the broken doorway into the sunlight. Chee kept his hand near the butt of his pistol, thinking Leaphorn couldn’t possibly believe that, thinking the weapon was probably a hand gun and it was probably in the backpack Gershwin was carrying. Or perhaps stuck in Gershwin’s belt, hidden by the shirt.
“It’s a terrible feeling,” Gershwin was saying, 'shooting a man.' And as he was saying that his hand flashed under the shirt and came out fumbling with a pistol.
Chee’s pistol was pointed at Gershwin’s chest. “Drop it,” Chee said. “Drop it or I kill you.”
Gershwin made an angry sound, dropped his pistol.
Leaphorn shouted, “Look out.” There was a blast of sound from the darkness. Gershwin was knocked sprawling into the dirt.
“He’s under that big sheet of plywood,” Leaphorn shouted. “I saw a side of it rise. Then the muzzle flash.”
The plywood was directly under the A-frame of timbers that rose through what was left of the building’s roof. Chee and Leaphorn approached it as one approaches a prairie rattler, with caution. Chee did his stalking via the side door, a route with better cover. He got there first, motioned Leaphorn in. They stood on opposite sides of it, looking down at it.
“Gershwin is dead,” Leaphorn said.
“I thought it looked like that,” Chee said.
“If you pulled that plywood back, you’d expect to look right down into a vertical shaft,” Leaphorn said. “But whoever pushed it up and stuck out that rifle barrel had to be standing on something.”
“Probably some sort of rope ladder at least,” Chee said. “Or maybe they dug out some sort of niche.' He tried to visualize what would be under the plywood without much luck.
Leaphorn was studying him. “You want to pull it away and take a look?”
Chee laughed. “I think I’d rather just wait until Special Agent Cabot gets here with his people and let him do it. I wouldn’t want to mess up the Bureau’s crime scene.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
Jim Chee sprawled across the rear seat of Unit 11, his throbbing ankle high on a pillow reminding him of what the doctor had said about putting weight on a sprain before it’s healed. Otherwise, Chee was feeling no pain. He was at ease. He was content. True, George Ironhand was still at large in the canyons, either wounded or well, but he wasn’t Chee’s problem.
Chee relaxed, listened to the windshield wipers working against the off-and-on rain shower, eaves-dropped now and then on the conversation the Legendary Lieutenant was having with Officer Manuelito (Leaphorn was calling her Bernie) and rehashing the events of a tense and tiring day.
The reinforcements had arrived a little before sundown. First came two big Federal Bureau of
Investigation copters, hovering a while to find a place to put down among the hummocks of Mormon tea, the Special Agents swarming out, looking warlike in their official bulletproof costumes, pointing their automatic weapons at Leaphorn and looking miffed when Leaphorn ignored them. Then the business of trying to explain what had happened there. Explaining Gershwin to the Special Agent in Charge, who wanted to question everything, who wanted answers which would prove the Bureau was right in its Everett Jorie suicide/gang-leader conclusion, and who looked downright thunderstruck when he learned that the fellow instructing otherwise was just a civilian.
Chee grinned, remembering that. Leaphorn had cut off the SAC’s arguments by suggesting he could end his doubts by sending a few of his troops over to Gershwin’s truck and having them unpack some of the bundles, in which Leaphorn was confident they would find about one hundred seven pounds and eleven ounces of the paper money taken from the casino. The SAC did, and they did; some of the money was neatly double-sacked in eight of those Earth-Smart white-plastic kitchen trash bags stacked under Gershwin’s luggage, and a bunch of the bigger bills was layered into the suitcases with his clothing. While that was happening the ground troops arrived—two sheriff’s cars, a Utah State Police car and a BIA law-enforcement unit bringing an assortment of cops—including Border Patrol trackers with their dogs. The trackers nervously eyed the cumulus clouds, their tops backlit by the setting sun and their black bottoms producing lightning and promising the long-overdue rain. Trackers prefer daylight and dry ground and were making their preference obvious. Finally, the explaining stopped, an ambulance arrived to take away the much-photographed bodies, and now
