Free The Wailing Wind - Leaphorn & Chee 17 by Tony Hillerman Page A

Bernie had put that belief more or less behind her. Yet it was a large owl, it was looking at her, and something about this fire-blackened place had already made her uneasy. So she sat a bit, staring back at the motionless bird, and finally decided to ignore it. The next start it gave her came when she was much, much closer. She stopped again to inspect it and noticed it didn't look quite natural. It seemed to be tied to its limb. In fact, it was an artificial owl. The sort one buys to perch in fruit trees to keep birds from harvesting the cherries. Why put it there? The only reason that seemed possible to Bernie was to warn Navajos to stay away.
    More evidence, Bernie thought, that this must be the canyon. This had to be it. But would Chee and Largo and the rest of them believe her? As she considered that question she noticed another oddity. The bottom sand ahead of her looked unnaturally flat and unnaturally divided into levels. She hurried upstream.
    A sequence of logs had been dug into the streambed to form four little check dams—each about fifteen feet upstream and a foot or so higher than the one below. Clearly their purpose was to slow stream flow after rains, causing the current to drop more of its sand. Gravity being at work, the first stuff to sink would be the heavy gold particles. She was looking at a gold-panning sluice, and if she'd had a shovel and a bucket, she was pretty sure she could take home enough gold-rich sand to pay for the gasoline she'd used getting here. In fact, from where she stood, she could see the hole where, just a few days ago, Thomas Doherty had mined himself a little of the stuff for his Prince Albert can.
    And she would do so herself—just enough in her jacket pocket to deflate any doubters, to restore her status as an equal among equals in the world of law enforcement. Officer Bernadette Manuelito, filled with that special form of joy and exuberance produced when despairing disappointment is abruptly replaced with utter success, trotted happily up the streambed, her tired legs no longer tired, and jumped over the half-buried log into the sand.
    She would always wonder if that was why the shot missed her.
     
    Chapter Ten
     
    It took bernie some small fraction of a second to identify the mixture of sounds—the sharp crack of a bullet breaking the sound barrier as it zipped past her head, the sharp whack as it struck a few yards ahead, the bang of the rifle that fired it. Identification made, Bernie scrambled for cover in the rocks along the canyon wall.
    She huddled there a moment, collecting her scattered wits and making an inventory of the situation. Bernie's scramble had taken her behind a great slab of fallen stone—a place that had the advantage of being unquestionably bulletproof and the disadvantage of offering no easy way out which provided good cover. She sat with her back against the stone, unsnapped the strap on her holster, removed the pistol, and looked at it. It was a standard-issue police revolver, which held six .38-caliber rounds. Bernie had qualified with a high score at the firing range, but she hadn't developed any fondness for the thing. It was heavy, bulky, and cold, and it symbolized the one side of police work that did not appeal to her. She had worked at it, imagining situations in which she shot someone (always a fiercely aggressive male) in defense of some innocent life. In these situations Bernie had managed to merely disable and disarm the aggressor, ignoring the standard police policy of not drawing your gun unless prepared to shoot it, and not shooting unless you shot to kill. Now she knew, or thought she knew, that she would shoot if this situation required it, and shoot for the middle of the man trying to kill her.
    And who might that be? A man, of course. Bernie could not visualize a woman as sniper. Probably the same man who'd shot Thomas Doherty in the back—and probably for the same reason, which would be something involving this gold deposit. As