Leaphorn noticed Vang was looking tense, fright-ened.
“Why not just ride with me?”
Vang looked at Leaphorn, looked away, then down.
“After I go where Mr. Delonie lives, ah—. After I do what Mr. Delos told me to do, then I have to drive over to that place where he will be shooting the elk, and wait for him there, and he will be looking for this truck, and if I am riding in another truck, I think then he would think that I have been disobeying him.”
“Oh,” Leaphorn said. And waited.
“Yes,” Vang said. “I think I had better be there in that truck I drive for him.”
“Are you sort of afraid of him?”
“Afraid?” Vang asked, and thought about it. Nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “Very afraid.”
Leaphorn considered that for a moment. Of course he would be afraid. Everything in Tommy’s life depended on Jason Delos. Going home to his Hmong mountains, most of all.
“Okay,” he said. “Then we will turn the arrangement around. We’ll leave my truck at the Tribal Police office and we’ll take this one.”
And so they did. Vang pulled his King Cab pickup THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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into the Tribal Police parking lot behind Leaphorn, then turned off the ignition and waited while Leaphorn went into the office.
Inside, Leaphorn shook hands with Corporal Des-mond Shirley and explained what he was doing. Then he returned to his pickup and removed his cell phone and his police issue .38 pistol from the glove box. He dropped both into his jacket pocket, locked the door, and walked over to where Vang was sitting in his vehicle, watching.
“I think I should drive,” Leaphorn said.
Vang looked surprised.
“Because while you know the truck better, I know the roads, and all these pickups are pretty much alike.” Vang scooted over.
He took them north past the Crownpoint airport, then eastward across twenty-five miles of absolutely empty country toward Whitehorse. For the first half hour they drove in a sort of nervous silence, with Vang keeping his eye on his own road map—apparently making sure Leaphorn was taking them where his instructions told him to go. At the little settlement of Whitehorse, the pavement of Navajo 9 swerves northward to climb Chaco Mesa en route to the ancient ruins of Pueblo Pintado before swerv-ing back southward toward Torreon. Leaphorn turned off the pavement onto the twenty-three miles of dirt road that goes directly to Torreon without the wide detour.
“Ah, Mr. Leaphorn,” Vang said, sounding uneasy.
“You are leaving Highway 9. But my map says Nine takes us to Torreon. Takes us to find Mr. Delonie.”
“It does,” Leaphorn said. “But this dirt road takes us there directly, without going way up on Chaco Mesa. This way we get there quicker, and right to the Torreon Chap-182
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ter House. We should stop there and ask where we can find Delonie.”
“Oh,” Vang said. “Would he maybe be at the chapter house? Is that like a government office? For the Navajos who live around there?”
“It is,” Leaphorn said. “But Delonie isn’t a Navajo. I know he’s part Indian—Pottawatomie and Seminole—
because the name sounds French.”
“French?” Vang’s tone suggested he would like an explanation.
“Both of those tribes once lived in the part of America where a lot of French people settled. Like Louisiana and that southern coastal country. Then the Pottawatomies helped General Jackson defeat the British in the War of 1812. The fight for New Orleans. And when Jackson was elected president, he granted citizenship to the Pottawatomies who helped him. Made them the ‘Citizen Band.’
Then when the white people wanted the land they were living on, he had the army round them up and moved them to Kansas.”
Leaphorn glanced at Vang, noticed that Vang was not following his explanation and decided to hurry through it.
“Anyway, then the railroad built a transcontinental line through there, and the land in Kansas got valuable and the white people wanted it. So the Pottawatomies were rounded up again and moved down to Oklahoma.
They called it Indian Territory then. A lot of Seminoles got there, too, but I don’t remember how that happened.” Vang considered this.
“I think this is something like what happened to our people, too. My parents said our ancestors started way up north, in China, and kept being pushed south, and finally THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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got chased up into the mountains. But if Mr. Delonie is not a Navajo, why then would those at the Navajo Chapter House be likely know where to find him?”
“Because when there aren’t many people around, everybody gets noticed. I guess you’ve seen that very few
