At Ease with the Dead (22 page)

We left the Subaru and crossed the yard. Daniel Begay knocked on the door. The same thing happened here that had happened at Peter Yazzie's house. Nothing.

Daniel Begay cocked his head and frowned. “I smell something,” he said. He opened his mouth slightly, as though tasting the air. He closed his mouth, sniffed lightly, once, twice. He turned to me. “Gas.”

I squatted down by the door, put my hand near its base, fanned the hand, and swept air up toward my face.

Gas.

21

I
stood up. “Come on, Daniel,” I said, and took a backward step. “Away from the house.”

He looked at me. “He's in there.”

“I know. We'll get to him. But we've got to do it right. Come on.”

He walked beside me to the station wagon, turning once to look back over his shoulder at the house.

“In the car,” I told him.

We both got in and I started the engine. I backed out of the driveway and drove in reverse about thirty feet up the road, until I thought it was safe.

It was a guess. I had no idea how far the debris might be thrown if the house went up.

I leaned in front of Daniel Begay, popped the glove compartment, fumbled around inside until I found the Tekna flashlight and my leather gloves. I twisted the top of the flashlight. Still working. I put on the gloves.

I said to Daniel, “It's probably better if you're outside the car. On the side opposite the house.”

Lips tightly pressed together, he nodded.

We both got out. Daniel Begay circled the Subaru.

“I mean it,” I told him. “Stay here.”

He said, “Joshua.”

I think this was the first time he'd actually called me by name.

“Yeah?”

“You know what you're doing?”

“I hope so.”

I went back to the house.

There were two double-hung windows facing the street. I chose the one to the right of the front door, turned on the flashlight, swung the bright white beam around the room. Saw an old armchair with padding swelling from its seams. An old swayback love seat. A cheap fiberboard coffee table.

Nothing that looked like a person.

I examined the latch on the inside of the window. It wasn't set. All I had to do was push up on the sash. And pray it didn't create a spark.

It shouldn't.

I pressed upward. Nothing. I tried pulling down on the upper window. Nothing. Both had been painted shut.

Hell with this.

I smashed the butt of the flashlight against the glass, jerked my hand away. The window shattered and a sickening reek came tumbling from the innards of the house. The gas was piled up to the ceiling. No one inside could possibly be alive.

I crossed over to the other window. The curtain was drawn, and I couldn't see inside. I smashed the glass. Again, the stench of gas billowed out.

I turned to Daniel Begay. He was standing beside the Subaru's front bumper. “Daniel,” I called out. “For God's sake, stay there. I'm going around back.”

He said nothing.

I circled the house. The door at the rear had a window. I played the beam of the flashlight around inside. A sink. Some cupboards. A small, narrow counter. And something on the floor, a large bundle in front of the oven. The bundle had legs, and they were folded up beneath it.

I smashed the window, stood back as the glass scattered. I ripped away a big shard still hanging from the frame, tossed it behind me. I pulled the glove from my left hand, took a deep breath, poked myself in. Using the flashlight, I looked for locks along the door. Only a pushbutton on the knob. I reached in, slowly turned the knob. The door opened.

Wanting very badly to hurry now but knowing that I couldn't, I eased the door open. Still holding my breath, I stepped cautiously, flat-footed and very slow, along the linoleum floor. I reached down to the bundle, found the neck, searched for a pulse with my fingertips. There was none.

Gas was still sighing from the oven. I shifted the glove and the flashlight to my left hand, turned the knob off with my right. I stepped back across the linoleum and outside, leaving the door open behind me.

I let out my breath, sucked in a lungful of air. It was tainted with the stink of gas.

My left hand was sticky. I shone the flashlight on it. Something black and shiny. Blood. I thought for a moment that I'd cut myself at the window. Then realized, with a small involuntary shiver, that it belonged to the man on the floor.

I wiped it off on some weeds.

I walked around to the front of the house. Daniel Begay was on the front yard, walking toward me.

“He's dead,” I told him.

He nodded, and started to walk past me.

“Give it a minute,” I said. “There's still gas in there.”

He stopped. Looked at me. “They killed him.”

“Yeah.”

He nodded again. His face had no expression.

For five minutes neither of us spoke. I don't know what Daniel Begay was thinking, but I know that I was blaming myself. I should've called the local cops this morning, should've given them everything I had. They might've known that Peter Yazzie had a cousin. Might've warned him.

Finally, silently, Daniel Begay walked off toward the rear of the house. I followed him.

Inside the kitchen door, he stood there for a moment. The room still smelled of gas, but most of the stuff had dissipated. Safe now to turn on the overhead light. I flicked the switch.

Daniel Begay stepped forward to the body.

The police don't like things moved at a murder scene, especially the body. When Daniel gently began to lower the old man from his kneeling position to the floor, I almost said something.

But no one should have to spend his death huddled like that.

When Daniel Begay set the old man's bare shoulders on the linoleum, we both saw what Pablo and Ramon had done to him.

They had taken time with their work. The man was shirtless, and the cigarette burns covered his arms, his sunken chest, his face. Some of the burns were crusted over now, small round eyes open wide in horror. Some were still weeping serum and blood. They'd cut him, too, sliced him along the cheeks and along the stomach. When the cigarettes and the knives hadn't worked, they'd simply held his right hand into the flame of the stove-top burner. The clawed fingers were scorched, the flesh seared away.

Someone had given him a heavy blow along his right temple. Probably just before they arranged him at the oven door.

Daniel Begay reached into his back pocket, took out a folded white handkerchief. He unfolded it carefully and laid it gently, almost ceremoniously, over the man's face.

He stood up. “We got to go now,” he said. “We got to get to Peter Yazzie.”

He was right. Peter Yazzie was the key.

I told him, “We've got to call the cops first.”

He shook his head. “That's the sheriff. He'll keep us until the state police come. They'll keep us too. Too much time. The body is still warm. They only left a while ago. If we hurry, we can maybe stop them.”

“What about the Navajo police? Can we call them? Have them get to Yazzie before we do?”

“Maybe. If someone is close enough.”

“All right. If there's a phone here, don't use it. The cops'll check outgoing calls. There was a gas station back on the highway. We'll call from there.”

He nodded. “We got to go now.”

“One minute, Daniel. I'll be right back.”

It was in the living room and it wasn't hard to find. I knew what I was looking for.

No one who saw William Yazzie's body could believe that he attempted suicide. The setup with the oven didn't make sense unless Pablo and Ramon had some way of obliterating those wounds.

It was a simple appliance timer, the kind you use to start the coffee perking automatically in the morning. They'd hooked it up between the wall outlet and the cord of a standup lamp. Maybe, although I doubted it, the timer had belonged to William Yazzie. More likely, Pablo or Ramon had driven back into town and picked it up at a hardware store. They'd stripped three inches of insulation from the lamp's cord, leaving the two wires bare. When the timer went off and sent current down the cord, the wires would short out. The spark would set off the gas. Boom.

The subsequent fire would make it impossible to tell that William Yazzie had been burned before it broke out. The blow to the side of his head would likely be attributed to the explosion. If he were alive when they put him by the stove, and I thought he had been, then his lungs would be filled with gas.

A suicide, followed by an accidental explosion.

The timer was set to nine o'clock.

I looked at my watch. Eight forty-five.

If Daniel Begay and I had arrived only a little bit later, we'd have been as dead as William Yazzie.

Even with no gas in the room, the short circuit might start a fire. I tugged the timer from the outlet—carefully, using the edges of my fingertips so I wouldn't leave prints. Or smudge any that Pablo and Ramon might've left.

I was fairly certain that they hadn't left any. So far, Pablo was showing himself to be a good deal smarter than I would've thought. And a good deal more ruthless.

When I turned around, Daniel Begay was standing there, watching me. I explained the timer.

He nodded. His face still expressionless, he said, “Bastards.”

I agreed. I very much wanted to meet Pablo and Ramon again.

Daniel Begay made his phone call from the gas station on the highway. It took a while. At last he clambered back into the Subaru, pulled the door shut, and nodded toward the north. “We go that way.”

I wheeled the station wagon back onto the highway. “Who'd you talk to?” I asked him.

“My nephew in the Navajo police.”

“He's going to send some people to Peter Yazzie's?”

“He says it's not good to use the Navajo police. He says they're gonna want to know about Peter Yazzie's cousin, and we could get in trouble with the sheriff in Hollister. For leaving the brother's house without calling him. He says you're a stranger here.”

“But you're not.

“No,” he said. “I'm an Indian.” His face was unreadable.

The sheriff apparently didn't care for Indians.

“Daniel,” I said, “half the people in town heard me asking about Peter Yazzie and his cousin.”

He shook his head. “My nephew will make some phone calls. No one will remember we were there.”

Indian Magic. A few phone calls and our trip to Hollister never happened. “What about the bartender?”

“Someone will talk to him.”

“And what about Peter Yazzie? We could use some help with this, Daniel.”

“My nephew will come in the morning, as soon as he can. And he's got some friends near the cabin. Twenty miles away, maybe. He's calling them, to tell them to go over there.”

I frowned. “You're sure we couldn't call Window Rock and get some more troops up there?”

He shook his head. “There are some Navajo police I can't trust. They'd be glad to see me in trouble.” He shrugged. “It's politics.”

It didn't seem reasonable that politics should get in the way of saving a life. But it was something, I knew, that had happened before, all over the world. And no doubt Daniel Begay knew what he was talking about.

I said, “Will your nephew tell his friends to be careful?”

He nodded: “They'll be careful.”

As long as we stayed on paved road, I kept the Subaru up to ninety. At night, traveling that fast is a calculated risk; your headlights can't reach far enough ahead for the speed. A cow, a couple of sheep, anything wandering across the highway can create a disaster. We were lucky.

About thirty miles north of Hollister, Daniel told me to slow down. We were in the foothills now, scrub pines on either side of the road, juniper and mesquite. The road I wanted, Daniel told me, was just ahead.

It led off to the right, up into the mountains, and it wasn't much more than a rocky path.

The Subaru was tired. I'd been pushing it hard all day, in four-wheel and in two. It's a good, reliable car, but it's not a tank. Now, as it bucked over the track, things were rattling around somewhere under the floorboards.

Fortunately, there hadn't been any snow lately. Under the trees, here and there, were still some crescent shelves of white left unmelted from the last storm, whenever that had been, and, along the road, some flat clumps of sooty ice looking hard as rock. But nothing that would affect the car.

Other things affected the car. The path narrowed and began to fray. Gullies crisscrossed it. A few times, when I rounded a turn, the headlights showed nothing but empty space where the side of the mountain plunged away from the edge. The gravel beneath us became pebbles, the pebbles became rocks, the rocks became small boulders. Every three or four hundred yards, the station wagon bottomed out, and twice I was afraid I wouldn't be able to keep going.