Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 14] (7 page)

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.