cold.” He shrugged. “The way my mother had to do it.”
“Has a kitchen then,” Delonie said. “I guess they have a cabin up there handy for those permit hunters to keep dry and comfortable.”
“A little log house,” Tommy said. “Mostly just one big room and a little kitchen place and then there was a water tank on the roof. You turned a big valve and the water came down in a sink in the kitchen.” His expression registered disapproval. “It didn’t look very clean. Everything dirty. The water, too, I mean. Sort of rusty looking.”
“You were a mountain boy, weren’t you?” Delonie said. “Maybe that sort of reminded you of home. Log cabin, wood fire, and all.”
“It did,” Vang said, and looked down. “But we weren’t dirty like that.”
Delonie was staring at him, expression grim. “That son of a bitch,” he said. “He should have taken you home again.”
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225
“He said he would,” Vang said. “Said he was going to do that.”
“Do you still believe that?” Delonie asked.
Vang considered. “I used to believe it. For a long time I believed it,” he said. Then he bent over the map, either studying it or, Leaphorn guessed, not wanting them to see that he was about to cry.
“Right here,” Vang said, tapping an ink dot beside a line which, in the map marking code, identified a road as
“doubtful” and to be avoided in bad weather.
“I guess that’s where we’re going,” Leaphorn said.
“Shouldn’t be any problem this time of year.”
“I think that’s going to be on the old T.J.D. Cater spread,” Delonie said. “I hunted up fairly near to there when I was a lot younger. The old man owned a lot of his own land and then his grazing permit spread out over a bunch of National Forest leases. Went way up into the mountains, I remember. It was all posted. No trespassing. Had a deal with the Game Department people to let the deer and elk graze on his leased grass and drink his water. Then they’d give him a bundle of hunting permits he could sell.”
“But Mr. Delos said he’d be hunting on the Wither-spoon Ranch,” Vang said. “And that’s where he went last year. That mark he made right there, that little squiggle, he said that was a big sign by the road. It tells people that anybody who goes on the property without permission will be prosecuted. Big sign says Posted, and then there’s what Delos said they call ‘The Lazy W,’ painted on a board nailed to a tree.”
“Yeah,” Delonie said. “When old Cater died, With-erspoon’s the one who bought out the estate. And that 226
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sounds like his brand. That’s what I heard. Anyway, whoever has it, to hunt up there you still had to either sneak in, or pay the bastards their fee.”
“Okay,” Leaphorn said. “Now let’s figure out the best way to get there.”
Delonie pushed back his chair and rose.
“I’ll leave that to you, Lieutenant Leaphorn,” he said.
“I’m going to fix us some supper. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day and probably pretty interesting. We should eat something and then get some sleep.”
19
For Leaphorn, getting some sleep had been easier said than accomplished. After feeding them overfried pork chops with bread, gravy, and more coffee, Delonie had put him and Tommy Vang in a space once apparently used as a second bedroom but now stacked full of odds and ends of mostly broken furniture. Vang fit himself neatly onto a sagging sofa against the wall, leaving Leaphorn to retire upon a stack of three old mattresses on the floor.
It was comfortable enough, and certainly Leaphorn was tired enough, but his mind was occupied with setting up plans for the various unpleasant situations he kept imagining. Ideally, Delonie would get an early look at Delos, would clearly identify him as the man who called himself Ray Shewnack, the one who had murdered the Handys in cold blood and then gone on to earn high rank-ing on the FBI’s list of Most Wanted felons. In that case, he would manage to persuade Delonie to choke down 228
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his long-building hatred and come back with Leaphorn to get a warrant for the arrest of Delos. An even happier outcome involved Delonie staring through his telescopic sight a bit and declaring that Delos was not Shewnack, that he didn’t resemble Shewnack in any way at all, and asking what in the world had provoked Leaphorn into taking them on this foolish wild-goose chase. Whereupon Leaphorn would apologize to Delonie, head for home, and try to forget this whole affair.
But what about Tommy Vang then? And what if Delonie simply kept looking through that telescopic sight on his rifle until he was certain it was Shewnack and then shot the man? Even worse, what if Delos, who had clearly demonstrated his tendency to be cautious, saw them first, recognized the danger, and initiated shooting himself ?
Judging from the trophy heads on his wall, he was good at shooting. And Delos certainly knew Delonie was a dangerous enemy, and the fact that he had also poisoned one of those delicious-looking cherries for Leaphorn’s own lunch made it clear that the name of Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, retired, was also on his kill list.
Leaphorn had worked his way through a multitude of such thoughts, including whether Tommy Vang was still perhaps just a little bit loyal to Delos, how much he could be trusted, and how to handle the Vang situation in general. He was still thinking that when he finally dozed off. He resumed pondering it when the sound of Delonie clumping around in the next room and the smell of coffee perking jarred him out of an uneasy sleep.
