Hunting Badger jlajc-14 Page 6

  Memory clicked in. He’d been there before. Now he knew why Jorie’s name had rung a bell. He’d come to this ranch at least twenty-five years ago to deal with a complaint from a rancher that Jorie was shooting at him when he flew his airplane over. Jorie had been amiable about it. He had been shooting at crows, he said, but he sure did wish that Leaphorn would tell the fellow that flying so low over his place bothered his cattle. And apparently that had ended that—just another of the thousands of jobs rural policemen get solving little social problems among people turned eccentric by an overdose of dramatic skyscapes, endless silence and loneliness.

  Leaphorn fished his binoculars from the glove box for a closer look. Nothing much had changed. The windmill tower now also supported what seemed to be an antenna, which meant Jorie—like many empty-country ranchers living beyond the reach of even Rural Electrification Administration power lines—had invested in radio communication. And the windmill was also rigged to turn a generator to provide the house with some battery-stored electricity. A little green tractor, dappled with rust and equipped with a front-end loader, was parked in the otherwise-empty horse corral. No other vehicle was visible, which didn’t mean one wasn’t sitting somewhere out of sight.

  Leaphorn found himself surprised by this. He’d expected to see a pickup, or whatever Jorie drove, parked by the house and Jorie working on something by one of the outbuildings. He’d expected to confirm that Jorie had not flown away with the Ute Casino loot and that Gershwin had been using him in some sort of convoluted scheme. He leaned back on the truck seat, stretched out his legs, and thought the whole business through again. A waste of time? Probably. How about dangerous? He didn’t think so, but he’d have an explanation for this visit handy if Jorie came to the door and invited him in. He shifted the truck back into gear, drove slowly down the slope, parked under the cotton wood nearest the front porch and waited a few moments for his arrival to be acknowledged.

  Nothing happened. No one appeared at the front door to note his arrival. He listened and heard nothing. He got out of the truck, closed the door carefully and silently, and walked toward the house, up the stone front steps, and tapped his knuckles against the doorframe. No response. A faint sound. Or had he imagined it?

  “Hello,” Leaphorn shouted. “Anyone home?”

  No answer. He knocked again. Then stood, ear to the door, listening. He tried the knob, gently. Not locked, which wasn’t surprising and didn’t necessarily mean Jorie was home. Locking doors in this empty country was considered needless, fruitless and insulting to one’s neighbors. If a thief wanted in, it would be about as easy to break the glass and climb in through a window.

  But what was he hearing now?

  A dim, almost imperceptible high note. Repeated. Repeated. Then a different sound. Something like a whistle. Birdsong? Now a bit of the music meadow-larks make at first flight. Leaphorn moved down the porch to a front window, shaded the glass with his hands and peered in. He looked into a dark room, cluttered with furniture, rows of shelved books, the dark shape of a television set.

  He stepped off the end of the porch, walked around the corner, of the house and stopped at the first window. The front of a green Ford 150 pickup jutted out from behind the house. Jorie’s? Or someone else’s? Perhaps Buddy Baker. Or Ironhand. Or both. Leaphorn became abruptly conscious that he was a civilian. That he didn’t have the .38-caliber revolver he would have had with him if he was a law officer on duty. He shook his head. This uneasiness was groundless. He walked to the corner of the house. The truck was an oversize-cab model with no one visible in it. He reached through the open window and pulled down the sunshade. Clipped on it was the required liability-insurance certification in Jorie’s name. The cab was cluttered with trash, part of a newspaper, an Arby’s sandwich sack, a bent drinking straw, three red poker chips—the twenty-five-dollar denomination bearing the Ute Casino symbol—on the passenger-side seat.

  Leaphorn considered the implications of that a moment, then walked back to the house, put his forehead against the glass, shaded his eyes and looked into what seemed to be a bedroom also used as an office.

  Once again he heard the birdcalls, more distinct now. To his right, close to the window, a single bright spot in the darkness attracted his eye. What seemed to be a small television screen presented the image of a meadow, a pond, a shady woods, birds. His eyes adjusted to the dimness. It was a computer monitor. He was seeing the screen saver. As he looked the scene shifted to broken clouds, a formation of geese. The birdsong became honking.

  Leaphorn looked away from the screen to complete a scanning of the room. He sucked in his breath. Someone was slumped in the chair in front of the computer, leaning away, against an adjoining desk. Asleep? He doubted it. The position was too awkward for sleep.

  Leaphorn hurried back across the porch, opened the door, shouted, “Hello. Hello. Anyone home?” and trotted through the living room into the bedroom.

  The form in the chair was a small, gray-haired man, wearing a white T-shirt with HANG UP AND DRIVE printed across the back, new-looking jeans and bedroom slippers. His left arm rested on the tabletop adjoining the computer stand, and his head rested upon it with his face illuminated by the light from the monitor. The light brightened as the screen saver presented a new set of birds. That caused the color of the blood that had seeped down from the hole above his right eye to change from almost black to a dark red.

  Everett Jorie, Leaphorn thought. How long have you been dead? And how many years as a policeman does it take for me to get used to this? And understand it? And where is the person who killed you?

  He stepped back from Jorie’s chair and surveyed the room, looking for the telephone and seeing it behind the computer with two stacks of the red Ute Casino chips beside it. Jorie was irrevocably dead. Calling the sheriff could wait for a few moments. First he would look around.

  A pistol lay partly under the computer stand, beside the dead man’s foot—a short-barreled revolver much like the one Leaphorn had carried before his retirement. If there was a smell of burned gunpowder in the room, it was too faint for him to separate from the mixed aromas of dust, the old wool rug under his feet, mildew and the outdoor scents of hay, horse manure, sage and dry-country summer invading through the open window.

  Leaphorn squatted beside the computer, took his pen from his shirt pocket, knelt, inserted it into the gun barrel, lifted the weapon and inspected the cylinder. One of the cartridges it held had been fired. He took out his handkerchief, pushed the cylinder release and swung it open. The cartridge over the chamber was also empty. Perhaps Jorie had carried the pistol with the hammer over a discharged round instead of an empty chamber, a sensible safety precaution. Perhaps he didn’t. That was something to be left to others to determine. He returned the pistol to its position beside the victim’s foot, slid out the ballpoint, then stood for a moment, holding the pen and studying the room.

  It held a small, neatly made double bed. Beyond the bed, an automatic rifle leaned against the wall, an AK-47. A little table beside it held a lamp, an empty water glass and two books. One was The Virtue of Civility, with the subtitle of“Selected Essays on Liberalism.” The other lay on its back, open.

  Leaphorn checked the page, used the pen to close it. The cover title read: Cato’s Letters: Essays on Liberty. He flipped the book open again, remembering it from a political science course in his undergraduate days at Arizona State. Appropriate reading for someone trying to go to sleep. The bookshelves along the wall were lined with similar fare: J.F. Cooper’s The American Democrat, Burke’s Further Reflections on the Revolution in France, Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government, de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, along with an array of political biographies, autobiographies and histories. Leaphorn extracted The Servile State from its shelf, opened it and read a few lines for the sake of Hilaire Belloc’s poetic polemics. He’d read that one and a few of the others thirty years or so ago in his period of fascination with political theory. Most of them
were strange to him, but the titles were enough to tell him that he’d find no socialists among Jorie’s heroes.

  He located Jorie’s telephone book in an out basket beside the phone, found he could still remember the proper sheriff’s number and picked up the telephone receiver. From the computer came an odd gargling sound. The screen was displaying a long V of sandhill cranes migrating against a winter sky. Leaphorn put down the phone, took his ballpoint pen, and tapped the computer mouse twice.

  The cranes and their gargling vanished—instantly replaced on the screen by text. Leaphorn leaned past the body and read:

  NOTICE: To anyone who might care, if such person exists, I declare 1 am about to close in appropriate fashion my wasted life. Fittingly, it ends with another betrayal. The sortie against the Ute Casino, which 1 foolishly believed would help finance our struggle against federal despotism, has served instead to finance only greed—and that at the needless cost of lives.

  My only profit from this note will be revenge, which the philosophers have told us is sweet. Sweet or not, I trust it will remove from society two scoundrels, betrayers of trust, traitors to the cause of liberty and American ideals of freedom, civil rights and escape from the oppression of an arrogant and tyrannical federal government.

  The traitors are George (Badger) lronhand, a Ute Indian who runs cattle north of Montezuma Creek, and Alexander (Buddy) Baker, whose residence is just north of the highway between Bluff and Mexican Hat. It was lronhand who shot the two victims at the casino and Baker who shot at the policeman near Aneth. Both of these shootings were in direct defiance of my orders and in violation of our plan, which was to obtain the cash collection from the casino without causing injury. We intended to take advantage of the confusion caused by the power failure and the darkness and to cause injury to no one. Both lronhand and Baker were aware of the policy of gambling casinos, following the pattern set in Las Vegas, of instructing security guards not to use their weapons due to the risk of injury to clients and to the devastating publicity and loss of revenue such injuries would produce. Thus the deaths at the casino were unplanned, unprovoked, unnecessary and directly contrary to my instructions.

  By the time we reached the point where we had planned to abandon the vehicle and return to our homes it had become clear to me that this violence had been privately planned by lronhand and Baker and that their plan also included my own murder and their appropriation of the proceeds for their private and personal use. Therefore, I slipped away at the first opportunity.

  I have no apologies for the operation. Its cause was just—to finance the continued efforts of those of us who value our political freedom more than life itself, to forward our campaign to save the American Republic from the growing abuses of our socialist government, and to foil its conspiracy to subject American citizens to the yoke of a world government.

  It would not serve our cause for me to stand the pseudo trial which would follow my arrest. The servile media would use it to make patriots appear to be no more than robbers. I prefer to sentence myself to death rather than endure either a public execution or life imprisonment.

  However, arrest of lronhand and Baker and the recovery of the casino proceeds they have taken would demonstrate to the world that their murderous actions were those of two common criminals seeking their own profits and not the intentions of patriots. If you do not find them at their homes, I suggest you check Recapture Creek Canyon below the Bluff Bench escarpment and just south of the White Mesa Ute Reservation, lronhand has relatives and friends among the Utes there, and I have heard him talking to Baker about a free flowing spring and an abandoned sheepherder’s shack there.

  I must also warn that after the business was done at the casino, these two men swore a solemn oath in my presence not to be taken alive. They accused me of cowardice and boasted that they would kill as many policemen as they could. They said that if they were ever surrounded and threatened with capture, they would continue killing police under the pretext of surrendering.

  Long Live Liberty and all free men. Long live America.

  I now die for it. Everett Emerson Jorie

  Leaphorn read through the text again. Then he picked up the telephone, dialed the sheriff’s office number, identified himself, asked for the officer in charge and described what he had found at the residence of Everett Jorie.

  “No use for an ambulance,” Leaphorn said. And yes, he would wait until officers arrived and make sure that the crime scene was not disturbed.

  That done, Leaphorn walked slowly through the rest of Jorie’s home—looking but not touching. Back in Jorie’s office, the sandhill cranes were again soaring across the computer screen saver, projecting an odd flickering illumination on the walls of the twilight room. Leaphorn tapped the mouse with his pen again, and reread the text of Jorie’s note a third time. He checked the printer’s paper supply, click on the PRINT icon, and folded the printout into his hip pocket. Then he went out onto the front porch and sat, watching the sunset give the thunderclouds on the western horizon silver fringes and turn them into yellow flame and dark red, and fade away into darkness.

  Venus was bright in the western sky when he heard the police cars coming.

  Chapter Ten

  Jim Chee turned down a side road on the high side of Ship Rock and parked at a place offering a view of both the Navajo Tribal Police district office beside Highway 666 and his own trailer house under the cottonwoods beside the San Juan River. He got out, focused his binoculars and examined both locations. As he feared, the NTP lot was crowded with vehicles, including New Mexico State Police black-and-whites, some Apache and Navajo County Sheriffs’ cars, and three of those shiny black Fords instantly identifiable by all, cops and criminals alike, as the unmarked cars used by the FBI. It was exactly what the newscasts had led him to expect. The word was out that the missing L-17 had been found resting in a hay shed near Red Mesa. Thus the fervent hope of all Four Corners cops that the Ute Casino bandits had flown away to make themselves someone else’s problem in another and far-distant jurisdiction had been dashed. That meant leaves would be canceled, everybody would be working overtime—including Sergeant Jim Chee unless he could keep out of sight and out of touch.

  He focused on his own place. No vehicles were parked amid the cottonwoods that shaded his house trailer, so maybe no one was there waiting to order him back to duty. Chee had time left on his leave. He’d spent the morning making the long drive to the west slope of the Chuska range and then into high country to the place where Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai had always spent his summers tending his sheep, and where he now spent them doing the long slide into death by lung cancer. But Nakai wasn’t there. And neither was his wife, Blue Woman, nor their truck.

  Chee was disappointed. He’d wanted to tell Nakai that he’d been right about Janet Pete—that marriage with his beautiful, chic, brilliant silver-spoon socialite lawyer would never work. Either she would give up her ambitions, stay with him in Dinetah and be miserable, or he’d take the long bitter step out of the Land Between the Sacred Mountains and become a miserable success. In his gentle, oblique way, Nakai had tried to show him that, and he wanted to tell the man that he’d finally seen it for himself. Chee hung around for a while, thinking Nakai would be back soon. Even with his cancer in one of its periodic remissions, he wouldn’t be strong enough for any extended travels. Certainly Nakai wouldn’t be strong enough to conduct any of the curing ceremonials that his role as a yataalii required of him.

  When the sun dipped behind the thunderheads over Black Mesa on the western horizon, Chee gave up and headed home. He would try again tomorrow unless Captain Largo located him. If that happened, he’d be spending what was left of his vacation trudging up and down canyons, serving as live bait for three fellows armed with automatic rifles and a demonstrated willingness to shoot cops.

  Now he put his binoculars back into their case, drove down the hill and left his pickup behind a screen of junipers behind his trailer. A note was fastened to his screen door
with a bent paper clip.

  “Jim — The Captain says for you to report in right away.”

  Chee repinned it to the door and went in. The light on his telephone answering machine was blinking. He sat, took off his boots, and punched the answering-machine button.

  The voice was Cowboy Dashee’s:

  “Hey, Jim. I filled the sheriff in on us finding Old Man Timms’s airplane. He called the feds, they got me on the phone, too. (Sound of Cowboy chuckling.) The agent quizzing me didn’t want to believe it was the same airplane, and I don’t blame him. I didn’t want to believe it either. Anyway, they sent somebody down there to make sure us indigenous people can tell an old L-17 from a zeppelin, and now the same old manhunt circus is getting organized just like in ‘98. If you want to save what’s left of your vacation, I’d recommend you keep a long way from your office.”

  The next call was brief.

  “This is Captain Largo. Get your ass down here. The feds located that damned airplane, and we’re going to be the beagles on one of their fox hunts again.“ Largo, who normally sounded grouchy, sounded even grouchier than usual.

  The third call was his insurance dealer telling him he needed to add an uninsured motorists clause to his policy. The fourth and final one was Officer Bernadette Manuelito.

  “Jim. I talked to Cowboy, and he told me what you did. And I want to thank you for that. But I was at the hospital in Farmington this morning, and they have Hosteen Nakai there. He’s very sick, and he told me he needs to see you. I’m going to come by your place. It’s ah, it’s almost six. I should be there by six-thirty or so.”