7
“Okay,” he said. “I promise.”
“Me, too,” said Bernie, who seemed to be taking this a little more seriously. “On with the story.” Leaphorn took a cookie, sampled the fresh coffee.
“For me it started just about the time you two were enjoying yourselves in Hawaii. I had a call telling me I had mail down at the office, so I went down to see what it was.
That’s what pulled me into it.”
He took a bite of cookie, remembering he’d had to park in the visitors’ parking lot. It was just starting to rain. “Big lightning bolt just as I parked there,” he said.
“If I was as well tutored in our Navajo mythology as your husband is, Bernie, I would have recognized right away that the spirit world wasn’t happy. I’d have seen that as a bad omen.”
Chee had never got quite used to Leaphorn kidding him about his goal of being both a tribal policeman and a certified shaman, conducting Navajo curing ceremonials.
Chee was frowning.
“Come on, Lieutenant,” he said. “You’re saying it was beginning to rain. Lightning flashes. Now tell us what happened next.”
“Big lightning bolt just as I got there,” he said, smiling at Chee. “And I think when I’m finished with this, with as much as I can tell you anyway, you’re going to agree it was a very bad omen.”
2
Eleven days earlier . . .
The boom of the lightning bolt caused Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, retired, to hesitate a moment before he climbed out of his pickup in the visitors’ parking lot. He took a serious look at the clouds building up in the western sky as he walked into the Navajo Tribal Police building. End of autumn, he was thinking. Monsoon season pretty much over. Handsome clouds of fog over the Lukachukai range this morning, but nothing promising a really good female rain. Just a noisy male thunderstorm.
It would be hunting season soon, he thought, which normally would have meant a lot of work for him. This year he could just kick back, sit by the fire. He’d let younger cops try to keep track of the poachers and go hunting for the city folks who always seemed to be losing themselves in the mountains.
Leaphorn sighed as he walked through the entrance.
10
TONY HILLERMAN
He should have been enjoying that sort of thinking, but he wasn’t. He felt . . . well . . . retired.
Nobody in the police department hall. Good. He hurried into the reception office. Good again. Nobody there except the pretty young Hopi woman manning the desk, and she was ignoring him, chatting on the telephone.
He took off his hat and waited.
She said: “Just a moment,” into the telephone, glanced at him, said: “Yes, sir. Can I help you?”
“I had a message from Captain Pinto. Pinto said I should come in and pick up my mail.”
“Mail?” She looked puzzled. “And you are?”
“I’m Joe Leaphorn.”
“Leaphorn. Oh, yes,” she said. “The captain said you might be in.” She fumbled in a desk drawer, pulled out a manila envelope, looked at the address on it. Then at him.
“Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn,” she said. “Is that you?”
“That was me,” Leaphorn said. “Once.” He thanked her, took the envelope back to his truck, and climbed in, feeling even more obsolete than he had as he’d driven by the police-parking-only spaces and stopped in visitors’
parking.
The return address looked sort of promising. Why Worry Security, with a Flagstaff, Arizona, street address.
The name penned under that was Mel Bork. Bork? Well, at least it wasn’t just more of the junk mail he’d been receiving.
“Bork?” Leaphorn said it aloud, suddenly remembering. Smiling. Ah yes. A skinny young man named Bork had been his fellow semi-greenhorn westerner friend from way, way back when both of them were young country-boy cops sent back East to learn some law enforcement THE SHAPE SHIFTER
11
rules at the FBI Academy. And his first name, by golly, had been Melvin.
Leaphorn opened his Swiss army knife, slit the envelope, slid out the contents. A page of slick paper from a magazine with a letter clipped to it. He took off the clip and put the letter aside.
The page was from
The assorted furniture looked plush and expensive. But Leaphorn’s attention was drawn away from this by an
