"Chee!" he shouted. "Chee!"
He examined the floor, moving the flash beam methodically back and forth, looking for a wiped place and seeing none. Perhaps it had been done in the front room. He squatted, holding the flash close to the linoleum, looking for tracks. He saw, instead, a path. It was fairly regular, possibly eighteen inches wide—a strip of the plastic surface wiped clean of dust. A pathway leading from the doorway into the front room, down the center of this back room, to the back door.
The back door opened and Chee looked in. "I think somebody, or maybe something, got dragged out of here," Chee said. "Drag marks leading up toward the rocks."
"Through here too," Leaphorn said. He drew the flashlight beam along the polished, dust-free path. "To the back door. But look at this." He handed Chee the damp cloth. "Smell it," he said.
Chee smelled.
"Blood," Chee said. "Smells like it." He glanced at Leaphorn. "Wonder what was in that stew. Fresh mutton, you think?"
"I doubt it," Leaphorn said. "I think we ought to find where those drag marks take us. I want to know what's being dragged."
"Or who's being dragged," Chee said.
Bare earth that has been lived on for years and as dry as drought can make it becomes almost as hard as concrete. From the back door, Leaphorn saw nothing until Chee's flashlight beam, held close to the earth, created shadows where something even harder had been pulled across its surface. Scratches. The scratches led past the windmill tower, past the metal storage building, and beyond. On the slope, where the earth was less pounded, the scratches became scuff marks between the scattering of wilted weeds and clumps of grass. "Up toward the hogan," Leaphorn said. "It leads that way."
Even in the less compacted earth the drag marks were hard to follow. The twilight had faded into almost full dark now, with only a flush of dark red in the west. The wind had risen again, kicking up dust in front of Leaphorn. He walked with his flashlight focused on the ground, picking up the sign of dislodged earth and crushed weeds.
Even in retrospect, Leaphorn didn't remember hearing the shot—being aware first of pain. Something that felt like a hammer struck his right forearm and the flashlight was suddenly gone. Leaphorn was sitting on the ground, aware of Chee's voice yelling something, aware that his forearm hurt so badly that something must have broken it. The sound of Chee's pistol firing, the muzzle flash, brought him out of the shock and made him aware of what had happened. Roosevelt Bistie, that son-of-a-bitch, had shot him.
Chapter 14
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the "officer down" call provokes a special reaction in each police jurisdiction. In the Shiprock subagency of the Navajo Tribal Police, Captain A. D. Largo commanding, it produced an immediate call to Largo himself, who was home watching television, and almost simultaneous radio calls to all Navajo Police units on duty in the district, to the New Mexico State Police, and the San Juan County Sheriff's Office. Then, since the Chuska Mountains sprawl across the New Mexico border into Arizona, and Sanostee is only a dozen or so miles from the state boundary, and neither the dispatcher at Shiprock nor anyone else was quite sure in which state all this was happening, the call also went out to the Arizona Highway Patrol and, more or less out of courtesy, to the Apache County Sheriffs Office, which might have some legitimate jurisdiction even though it was a hundred miles south, down at St. Johns.
The Farmington office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which had ultimate jurisdiction when such a lofty crime is committed on an Indian reservation, got the word a little later via telephone. The message was relayed to Jay Kennedy at the home of a lawyer, where he was engaged in a penny-a-point rotating-partner bridge game. Kennedy had just won two consecutive rubbers and was about to make a small slam, properly bid, when the telephone rang. He took the call, finished the slam, added up the score, which showed him to be ahead 2,350 points, collected his $23.50, and left. It was a few minutes after 10 P.M.
A few minutes after 10:30, Jim Chee got back to the Bistie place. He had met the ambulance from Farmington at Littlewater on U.S. 666. While Leaphorn was being tucked away in the back, Captain Largo had arrived—Gorman riding with him—and had taken charge. Largo asked a flurry of questions, sent the ambulance on its way, and made a series of quick radio checks to ensure roadblocks were in place. He'd hung up the microphone and sat, arms folded, looking at Chee.
"Too late for roadblocks, probably," he said.
It had been a long day for Chee. He was tired. All the adrenaline had drained away. "Who knows," he said. "Maybe he stopped to fix a flat. Maybe he didn't even have a car. If it was Bistie himself, maybe he just went back to his house. If—"
"You think it might be somebody besides Bis-tie?"
"I don't know," Chee said. "It's his place. He shoots at people. But then maybe somebody doesn't like him any better than he likes other people, and they came and shot him and dragged him off into the rocks."
Largo's expression, which had already been sour, suggested he didn't like Chee's tone. He stared at Chee.
"How did it happen?" he asked. "One old man, sick, and two cops with guns?"
Largo obviously didn't expect an answer and Chee didn't attempt one.
"You and Gorman go back up there and see if you can find him," Largo said. "I'll have the state police and the sheriff's people follow you. Don't let 'em get lost."
Chee nodded.
"I'm meeting Kennedy here," Largo said. "Then we'll come along and join you."
Chee headed for his car.
"One more thing," Largo shouted. "Don't let Bistie shoot you."
And now, at 10:55, Chee parked beside Bistie's now-dark light pole, got out, and waited for the entourage to finish its arrival. He felt foolish. Bistie's truck was still absent. Bistie's shack was dark. Everything seemed to be exactly as they had left it. The chance of Bistie's hanging around to await this posse simply didn't exist.
There was a general slamming of doors.
Chee explained the layout, pointed up into the darkness to the hogan from which the shots had come. They moved up the slope, weapons drawn, the state policeman carrying a riot gun, the deputy carrying a rifle. What had happened here two hours before already seemed unreal to Chee, something he had imagined.
No one was at the hogan, or in it.
"Here's some brass," the state policeman said. He was an old-timer, with red hair and a freckled, perpetually sunburned face. He stood frowning down at a copper-colored metal cylinder which reflected the beam of his flashlight. "Looks like thirty-eight caliber," he said. "Who'll be handling the evidence?"
"Just leave it there for Kennedy," Chee said. "There should be another one." He was thinking that the empty cartridge certainly wasn't from a 30-30. It was shorter. Pistol ammunition. And, since it had been ejected, probably from an automatic—not a revolver. If Bistie had fired it, he seemed to have quite an arsenal.
"Here it is," the state policeman said. His flashlight was focused on the ground about a long step from where the first cartridge lay. "Same caliber."
Chee didn't bother to look at it. He considered asking everyone to be careful of where they walked, to avoid erasing any useful tracks. But as dry and windy as it was, he couldn't imagine tracking as anything but a waste of time. Except for the drag marks. Whatever had been dragged up here should be easy to find.
It was.
"Hey," Gorman shouted. "Here's a body."
It was half hidden in a clump of chamiso, head downhill, feet uphill, legs still spraddled apart as if whoever had dragged it there had been using them to pull the body along and had simply dropped them.
The body had been Roosevelt Bistie. In the combined lights of Chee's and Gorman's flashlights, the yellow look of his face was intensified—but death had done little to change his expression. Bistie still looked grim and bitter, as if being shot was only what he'd expected—a fitting ending for a disappointing life. The dragging had pulled his shirt up over his shoulders, leaving chest and stomach bare. The waxy skin where the rib cage joined at the sternum showed two small holes, one just below the other. The lower one had bled a little. Very small holes, Chee thought. It seemed odd that such trivial holes would let out the wind of life.