Just as he had decided that, he saw the two Indian cops. They hurried into the exhibit hall together. Then the tall one broke into a run toward him, and the older one headed for Santero. Here Fleck could definitely see a problem. Both of these men had seen him, the older one clearly and in good light. No more time to wait for a bigger crowd. Fleck pushed his way past a man in a raincoat, past a television light technician, toward the VIP. The VIP was standing with a well-dressed fat man wearing bifocal glasses. They were studying a sheet of paper, discussing it. Probably, Fleck thought, they were looking at notes for the statement he intended to make. If he could handle it, Fleck decided he would take the VIP from the back. He slipped his right hand from his pocket, crumpling one end of the envelope as he gripped the shank handle. Then he moved, Fleck fashion, like lightning.
Leaphorn always thought things through, always planned, always minimized the opportunity for error. It was a lifelong habit, it was the source of his reputation as the man to handle impossible cases. Now he had only a few seconds to think and no time at all to plan. He would have to presume that there was a bomb, that Santero held the detonator, that Santero was working alone because only one person would be needed. Santero’s presence, lurking where he could watch the general, seemed to reinforce some of that thinking. The man was waiting until the general moved up to the position closest to the bomb. And the detonator? Probably something like the gadget that turned his television on and changed the channels. Grabbing him wouldn’t work. He’d be too strong and agile for Leaphorn to handle, even with surprise. He’d simply point the thing and push the button. Leaphorn would try confusion.
Santero heard him rushing up and whirled to face him. His right hand was in his coat pocket, the arm rigid.
“Señor Santero,” Leaphorn said, in a loud, hoarse, breathless whisper. “Venga conmigo! Venga! Pronto! Pronto! Venga!”
Santero’s face was shocked, bloodless. The face of a man interrupted at the moment of mass murder.
“Come with you?” he stammered. “Who are you?”
“Los Santillanes sent me,” Leaphorn said. “Come. Hurry.”
“But what—” Santero became aware that Leaphorn had gripped his right arm. He jerked it away, pulled out his right hand. He wore a black glove on it, and in the glove he held a small, flat plastic box. “Get away from me,” Santero said, voice fierce.
There was a clamor of voices from the crowd. Someone was shouting: “Hey! You! Get out of there.” Santero turned from Leaphorn, backing away, starting at the sound of a second shout: “Hey! Get away from that.”
Santero took another step backward. He raised the box.
“Santero,” Leaphorn shouted. “El hombre ahí no esta el general. No esta El General Huerta Cardona. Es un—” Leaphorn’s Arizona-New Mexico Spanish included no Castilian noun for “stand-in” or even “substitute.”
“Es un impostor,” he concluded.
“Impostor?” Santero said. He lowered the box a little. “Speak English. I can’t understand your Spanish.”
“I was sent to tell you they were using a stand-in,” Leaphorn said. “They heard about the plot. They sent someone made up to look like the general.”
Santero’s expression shifted from doubtful to grim. “I think you’re lying,” he said. “Stop trying to get between me and—”
From the crowd at the display came the sound of a woman screaming.
“What the devil—?” Santero began. And then there were shouts, another scream, and a man’s voice shouting: “He’s fainted! Get a doctor!”
Leaphorn’s move was pure reflex, without time to think. His only advantages were that Santero was a little confused, a little uncertain. And the hand in which Santero held the control box had only two fingers left inside that glove. Leaphorn struck at the hand.
Leroy Fleck said, “Excuse me. Excuse me, please,” and pushed past the woman he had been using as a screen and went for the general’s back. But he did it just as the general was turning. Fleck saw the general staring at him, and the general’s bodyguard making a quick-reflex move to block him. His instincts told him this was not going well.
“A letter—” he said, striking at the general’s chest. He felt the paper of the envelope crumple against his fist as the steel razor of the shank slit through the general’s vest, and shirt, and the thin muscle of the chest, and sank between the ribs.
“—from an admirer,” Fleck said, as he slashed back and forth, back and forth, and heard the general gasp, and felt the general sag against him. “He’s fainted!” Fleck shouted. “Get a doctor!”
The Muscle had grabbed him by the shoulder just as he shouted it, and struck him a terrible blow over the kidneys. But Fleck hugged the general’s sagging body, and shouted again, “Help me!”
It caused confusion, exactly as Fleck had hoped. The Muscle released Fleck’s arm and tried to catch the general. The Client was there now beside them, bending over the slumping body. “What?” he shouted. “What happened? General!”
Fleck withdrew the shank, letting the crumpled envelope fall. He stabbed The Client in the side. Stabbed him again. And again.
The bodyguard was no longer confused. He shot Fleck twice. The exhibit echoed with the boom of the pistol, and the screams of panicking spectators.
Chee was only dimly aware of the shouts, the screams, the general pandemonium around him. He was numb. He turned the mask in his hands and looked into it, with no idea what to expect. He saw two dangling wires, one red, one white, a confusing array of copper-colored connections, a small square gray box, and a heavy compact mass of blue-gray dough.
The security officer clutched his arm. “Come on!” he shouted. “Get out of here!” The security officer was a plump young black man with heavy jowls. The screams were distracting him. “Look,” Chee said, turning the open end of the mask toward him. “It’s a bomb.” While he was saying it, Chee was tearing at the wires. He dropped them to the floor, and sat on the back of the fallen manikin, and began carefully peeling the Yeibichai mask from the mass of blue-gray plastic which had been pressed into it.
“A bomb,” the guard said. He looked at Chee, at the mask, and at the struggle at the adjoining Incan exhibit. “A bomb?” he said again, and climbed the railing and charged into the Incan melee. “Break it up,” he shouted. “We have a bomb in here.”
And just then General Huerta Cardona’s bodyguard shot Leroy Fleck.
Joe Leaphorn’s hand knocked the control box out of Santero’s grip. It clattered to the marble floor between them. Santero reached for it.
Leaphorn kicked it. It went skittering down the corridor, spinning past the feet of running people. Santero pursued it, running into the crowd stampeding out of the exhibition hall. Leaphorn followed.
A man with a camera collided with him. “He killed the general,” the photographer shouted to someone ahead of him. “He killed the general.” On the floor near the wall Leaphorn saw fragments of black plastic and an AA-size battery. Someone had trampled the detonator. He stopped, backed out of the stampede. Santero had disappeared. Leaphorn leaned against the wall, gasping. His chest hurt. His hip hurt where the heavy camera had slammed into it. He would go and see about Jim Chee. But first he would collect himself. He was getting too damned old for this business.
Chapter Twenty-Two
« ^
Jim Chee sat on his bed, leaned back on his suitcase, and tried to cope with his headache by not thinking about it. He was wearing the best shirt and the well-pressed trousers he had hung carefully in the closet when he unpacked to save in the event he needed to look good. No need now to save them. He would wear them on the plane. It was a bitch of a headache. He had slept poorly—partly because of the strange and lumpy hotel mattress (Chee being accustomed to the hard, thin padding on the built-in bed of his trailer home), and partly because he had been too tense to sleep. His mind had been too full of horrors and terrors. He would doze, then jerk awake to sit on the edge of the mattress, shaking with the aftereffects of shallow, grotesque dreams in which Talking God danced before him. Finally, about a half-hour before the alarm was scheduled to rescue him from the night, he had given up. He had taken a shower, packed his stuff, and checked again with the front desk to see if he had any messages. There was one from Leaphorn, which simply informed him that Leaphorn had returned to Window Rock. That surprised Chee. It was a sort of courtly thing for the tough old bastard to have done. There was a message from Janet Pete, asking for a call back. He tried and got no answer. By then the headache was flowering and he had time to kill. Downstairs he drank two cups of coffee—which usually helped but didn’t this morning. He left the toast he’d ordered on the plate and went for a walk.