Creeping along.”
“I see him now,” Leaphorn said. In the dim dawn light the figure seemed to be a tall man wearing a hat with floppy brims and what looked like the mixed gray-tan-green camouflage uniform modern hunters seem to favor, with a heavy-looking rifle hanging from its carrying strap over his left shoulder. Leaphorn glanced at Delonie, who was motionless, staring through the scope.
“Recognize him?”
“It could be Shewnack,” Delonie said. “Wish he’d take that damned hat off. I need better light to tell anything.” The figure was moving very slowly toward the rear of the pickup, as if the man was stalking it. He stopped behind the truck, motionless. Trying, Leaphorn guessed, 244
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to determine if he could see anything helpful through the rear window.
“He’s big and tall like Shewnack,” Delonie said, still staring through the scope. “I’d guess it could be him. But that hat covers too much of his face from this angle.”
“I think we better get closer. Maybe just go right on down.”
“Go down and knock that silly hat off of him,” Delonie said. “See what he’s got to say for himself.”
“Sooner the better,” Leaphorn said, pushing himself stiffly erect, feeling the reminder his leg muscles were sending him that he was getting older and was, techni-cally at least, in retirement. The groaning sound Delonie was making suggested he was feeling the same symptoms of elderliness.
They moved cautiously away from the granite outcrop and the brushy growth that had hidden them, Leaphorn feeling for the pistol in his jacket pocket, using thumb and forefinger to assure himself that the safety would slide off easily. Below them, the man in hunting garb was at the side of the truck now, opening the door, holding it open, Tommy Vang was climbing out, standing to face him. No handshake offered, Leaphorn noticed. Just talking. A big man to a little man. The big man making a gesture, which Leaphorn interpreted as angry. The big man taking Tommy by the arm, perhaps shaking him, although Leaphorn wasn’t sure of that. Then the two were walking toward the house, big man in front, Tommy following. And then the two disappeared onto the porch, out of sight.
Probably indoors.
“Let’s get down there,” Leaphorn said. “Find out THE SHAPE SHIFTER
245
what’s happening.” Delonie must have felt the same way.
He had already broken into a trot.
They stopped at the windowless north wall of the house to get their breath and to listen, Leaphorn enjoying the reassuring feel of the pistol in his jacket, and Delonie tensely holding his rifle against his chest. They moved slowly around the corner to the porch.
“What’s that?” Delonie whispered. He was pointing at a heap of fresh dirt, the dark humus formed by centuries of fallen leaves and pine needles rotting every summer.
The humus seemed to have been dug from a hole under a sloping formation of broken sandstone. A shovel, with damp-looking humus still on its blade, leaned against the stone.
Leaphorn stepped over beside it. About three feet deep, he estimated. Between four and five feet long, a bit more than two feet wide, and a careless, irregular digging job. “Now what do you think is going to be buried there?” Delonie whispered. “Nothing very big.”
“No,” Leaphorn agreed. “But look how quick you could get something hidden in it. Just push that humus over it, and topple that sandstone slab over that, scatter a few handfuls of dead leaves and trash around. After the first rain there wouldn’t be much sign anybody had ever dug there.”
“Makes you wonder,” Delonie whispered, as they slipped cautiously around the corner by the porch.
The hunter was standing at the front door, watching them.
“Well, now,” Delos said, “what has brought the legendary Lieutenant Leaphorn all the way out here to my hunting camp.”
21
Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, retired, would sometimes wish that he had looked at his watch and noted the exact moment when he and Delonie had stepped in front of that porch and saw the man in the hunting camouflage smiling down at them. At that moment began an episode which seemed to last an awfully long time, but in reality must have been over in just a few minutes.
It was Jason Delos standing above them on the porch, looking even taller and more formidable than Leaphorn had remembered him. He was smiling, clean shaven, his hair tidy, both his hands deep in the pockets of an oversized hunting coat. The right-hand pocket, Leaphorn noticed, was bulging, with the bulge pointing toward him.
But his eyes had seemed friendly. Then their focus shifted to Delonie. The smile remained on his lips but was gone from his eyes.
“And my old friend Tomas Delonie,” Delos said. “I 248
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haven’t seen you in many, many years. But you shouldn’t be holding that rifle, Tomas,” he said. “They tell me you’re out on parole. Having that rifle makes you a violator, and Lieutenant Leaphorn would have to take you right back to prison. Drop that piece of yours on the ground there.” The tone was no longer friendly. The bulge in his pocket moved forward. “I mean drop the rifle right now.” Leaphorn’s eyes were focused on the bulge in the right- hand pocket of Delos’s jacket. Delos was almost certainly aiming a pistol right past Leaphorn’s head at Delonie, who now was letting his 30-30 dangle, muzzle downward.
