People Of Darkness

“How did he do it?” Mary asked.

“I have to guess. Obviously he left the rig. I’d say he probably got far enough away to be safe, and he had a rifle and fired a shot into the nitro bottle at the proper moment.”

Mary Landon shivered again and hugged herself. “And then he just walked away, so he’d be counted among the dead. Didn’t he have a family? A mother and father? People who loved him?”

“I don’t know anything about Lebeck,” Chee said.

“And then to come back here. Wouldn’t he be afraid someone would recognize him?”

“Probably nobody knew him, or had even seen him much. Just the well crew. It was an isolated place. Hardly a road then, and the crew would have lived out at the well, where nobody saw them. And then he stayed away two years. Maybe a little more. Long enough for the mineral lease to expire. Long enough to grow a heavy beard. Who knows-maybe he did something else to change his looks. I said we didn’t know anything about Lebeck, but we do know a little. You get into the paratroops by volunteering. And once he was in, he won two top decorations for courage. So I guess he wasn’t afraid of taking chances. Or of killing, either. He must have done a lot of it.” Chee paused, thinking about it. “I guess he knew he’d have some more to do.”

“The People of Darkness,” Mary said.

“Yeah. He couldn’t count on Dillon Charley forgetting him.”

“You think Dillon Charley saw Vines and recognized him as Lebeck?”

“Maybe. But I’ll bet Lebeck didn’t wait for that to happen. I’ll bet he went looking for him. Maybe he told Charley the Lord Peyote had given him a vision, too. Or maybe he just offered him a job, money, so forth. He’d know Charley wouldn’t tell the sheriff anything – not with the way Gordo was harassing him and his church. And besides, Charley wasn’t going to live very long.”

“Lebeck knew Dillon Charley had cancer?”

“Lebeck knew Charley was going to have cancer,” Chee corrected. “That black rock, it must be pitchblende. When the oil well bit drilled through it, Lebeck recognized pitchblende, and that’s the hottest kind of natural uranium deposit. He didn’t put it on the log, but he saved a piece of the core to test and make sure. And then he kept it because he saved mementos, and this one was going to change his life. Maybe he already knew it was going to be useful to him.”

“You’re losing me,” Mary said. “How do you know it’s pitchblende? I never heard of it. How do you know so much about it?”

“Out here everybody is prospecting half the time,” Chee said. “You learn about minerals, and mostly you learn about uranium-bearing minerals. I should have thought of it before. I think if we get a mineralogist to check those rock samples and those mole amulets, we’re going to find they’re radioactive. Vines gave Charley the mole knowing he would carry it in his medicine pouch – hanging from his waist under his clothing right against the groin.”

“Dillon Charley, and Tsossie, and Begay, and Sam, and all of them,” Mary said. She shivered again.

“He didn’t overlook much,” Chee said. “I think Dillon Charley must have been the first to die, and Vines got the body and buried it, just in case an autopsy would show something. But Navajos don’t have much interest in bodies, and the authorities don’t have much interest in dead Navajos, and people got scattered out, so after Dillon Charley it wasn’t worth the trouble, I guess. It looked like he could quit worrying. Everybody on that work crew who had ever seen him as Lebeck was dead, or soon would be. Nothing to worry about for years.”

“Not until Emerson Charley gets cancer,” Mary Landon said.

“I think that’s right,” Chee said. “Old Dillon was a pretty important religious leader, and people like that sometimes try to pass it along to their children. I guess he gave Emerson his medicine bundle, hoping he’d become the peyote chief, and one day, years later, Emerson decides to revive the cult. He starts wearing old Dillon’s mole, and of course he gets sick…”

Mary was leaning forward now. “And Vines gets nervous,” she said. “Now it’s 1980, and Vines doesn’t want Emerson checking into a modern cancer research center, where he’s sure to undergo an autopsy, and so he hires somebody to kill him.”

“And to steal the body,” Chee said.

“And probably to get the mole back. But the blond man missed the mole.”

“And Tomas Charley was too suspicious. The Navajos around Mount Taylor may not know a lot about radioactive pathology, but they could count up the fact that people who associated with Vines seemed to die. They knew he was a witch. When Emerson Charley’s truck was bombed, Tomas was suspicious. He wanted to prove Vines was a witch. He broke in and stole the box, and all Mrs. Vines knew was that the box was extremely important to Vines, so she asked me to get it back. I think she wanted to know Vines’ secret.”

The snow was falling more heavily now, drifting almost straight down out of an abruptly windless sky.

“Can’t we build that fire a little higher?” Mary asked.

“A little,” Chee said. He moved two chunks of piñon trunk into the blaze.

“You can’t prove any of this, can you?” Mary said. It wasn’t a question.

“I won’t have to,” Chee said. “I told the blond man. Tomorrow we’ll tell Gordo Sena. Sena won’t need proof either.”

32

CHEE PASSED THE WORD to Sheriff Sena via the radio in an El Paso Natural Gas Company helicopter. The copter had found them where the EPNG collector pipe bridges Nagasi Wash. They had built a fire in the brush that flourishes there, and not ten minutes after the greasy smoke spiraled into the sky, the little Bell had puttered over the rise. The pilot was a young man with a scarred nose, a walrus mustache, and the emblem of a First Cavalry Division gunship unit sewed on his greasy flying jacket. He had already spotted their bombed pickup truck, and circled it curiously, and he was ready to believe Chee’s story of a police emergency.

Chee told the sheriff’s dispatcher at Grants no more than Gordo Sena would need to know.

“Tell him the man who killed Tomas Charley is headed for B. J. Vines’ house. Tell him that Vines hired the man, and tell him that Vines’ real name is Carl Lebeck.”

“Lee what?” the dispatcher asked.

“Lebeck,” Chee said. “Be sure to get that right. Carl Lebeck.” Except for describing the truck, and the blond man, Chee offered no more details. They would be redundant. Gordo Sena had lived for thirty years with the details of that oil well explosion burning in his mind. He’d know instantly who Lebeck was, and he was smart enough to put it all together. The dispatcher had said Sena had left for the Anaconda Mine. The same road led through the fringes of the Laguna reservation toward the high slopes of Mount Taylor and Vines’ place. About fifteen miles, Chee guessed, compared to the sixty they had to cover in the helicopter. But that last mile or two would be impassable to something on wheels. Sena would have to walk in. Chee would get there first.

The thought excited him. At one level he was afraid of the blond man. At another, he longed to find him. His broken rib ached, as it had ached all morning. But it was more than vengeance. The man had shot him once. He had twice hunted Chee down to kill him. The memory still rankled – of the interminable minutes spent on the metal duct above the hospital ceiling, of the helpless panic in the blowhole. Now he was the stalker. He tried to analyze the feeling. Expectant? Exultant? Something between, and something more. There was a mixture of fear and of the remembered childhood feeling of the hunt. The smell of smoke, of boiling coffee, the forest scents carried on the predawn dew. His uncle greeting the sun with the dawn chant and blessing them all with the sacred pollen and singing the final song to call the spirits of the deer. Through the scarred, oil-smeared Plexiglas he could see the Turquoise Mountain rushing toward them, its upper slopes a virginal white, glittering in the sunlight against a sky swept clean by the night’s storm. The thump of the copter blades covered the words as he repeated the Stalking Song. Perhaps Mary heard them, jammed as she was between him and the pilot. She glanced at him curiously.