Leaphorn-Chee 02 - Dance Hall of the Dead - by Tony Hillerman

Author:Tony Hillerman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Police - Southwestern States, Police Procedural, Police, Leaphorn, Mystery & Detective, Southwest, Navajo Indians, Westerns, Fiction, Indian Reservation Police, Mystery Fiction, Lt. (Fictitious Character), New, Southwestern States, General, Zuni Indians, Joe
ISBN: 9780061808388
Publisher: Harper
Published: 1973-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

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Chapter Twelve

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Wednesday, December 3, 3:48 P.M.

IN ANOTHER two or three minutes the lower edge of the red sun would sink behind the strata of clouds hanging over western Arizona. Now the oblique angle of its late afternoon rays were almost parallel to the slope of the hillside toward Zuñi Wash. They projected the moving shadow of Ted Isaacs almost a thousand feet down the hillside, and beside it stretched the motionless shadow of Lieutenant Joseph Leaphorn. Every juniper, every bushy yellow chamiso, every outcrop of stone streaked the yellow-gray of the autumn grass with a stripe of dark blue shadow. And beyond the hillside, beyond the gridwork of twine that marked the Isaacs dig, two miles across the valley, the great bulk of Corn Mountain loomed, its broken cliffs sharply outlined in the reds and pinks of reflected sunlight and the blacks of shadows. It was one of those moments of startling beauty which as a matter of habit Joe Leaphorn took time to examine and savor. But he was preoccupied.

"Oh, God damn it," Isaacs said. "God damn it to hell." He threw another shovelful of earth onto the sifter frame, slammed the shovel against the wheelbarrow, and wiped his forehead against the back of his hairy forearm. He began working the dirt furiously through the wire, then threw down the trowel; sat on the edge of the sifter and looked at Leaphorn, his expression belligerent.

"I don't see how she could really be in any danger," he said. "That's just sheer damned guesswork." Isaacs' voice was angry. "Not even hardly guesswork. Just a sort of crazy intuition."

"I guess that's about right. Just a guess," Leaphorn said. He squatted now, sinking to his heels. A pair of golden eagles coasted down the air currents over the Zuñi River, hunting any rodent that moved. Leaphorn noted this without enjoying it. He found Isaacs' reaction interesting. Not what he expected.

Isaacs pinched the skin over the bridge of his nose between a grimy thumb and finger, shook his head. "George's dad got killed the same way Ernesto did, you say? Hit over the head." He shook his head again and then looked up at Leaphorn. "It does sound like somebody's crazy unless you can figure some reason for it." Across the slope toward Zuñi, smoke of supper cooking was beginning to make its evening haze over the hill that was Halona, the Middle Place of the World. "Maybe it's those goddamned Indians," Isaacs said. "Some kind of feud between the Zuñis and the Navajos, maybe. Could it be something like that?" His tone said he knew too much anthropology to believe it.

"No. Not likely," Leaphorn said. But he thought about it, as he had before. Would Ernesto's family strike out in revenge, presuming young Bowlegs had killed their son and nephew? From what Leaphorn knew of the Zuñi Way, such an act would be utterly unlikely. There hadn't been a homicide at Zuñi in modern times and damned few, Leaphorn suspected, in the history of these people.

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