“It’s my job never to believe anything too fast.”

When she put her back against the passenger door and folded her arms he added, “You’re the one who can reach him if anybody can. I’d like you to take him a message. Tell him he’s in a lot more trouble if he keeps hiding than he is if he gives himself up.”

“Why?”

He hadn’t thought that question would have been first on her list. She was not without surprises—or candor.

He said, “Because I have a feeling someone’s going to get hurt if he stays loose long enough.”

“Maybe that was why he broke loose in the first place. Didn’t you think of that?”

“I did, but I don’t have any facts.”

“You must have some. Otherwise you wouldn’t have got that far.”

She was giving him the first real break he’d had; there were admissions between the lines of what she was saying—her failure to deny the implications of what he had said. He wasn’t sure how to proceed from there; he didn’t want to scare her off.

She waited and when he didn’t speak she said, “You’re kind of new at the job.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve been questioned a few times.” She smiled; it was the same smile as before, it wasn’t completed and it left him uneasy. “I break the law a lot, you see. I’m an arch criminal, a menace to society. I smoke grass.”

“Gee whiz.”

“I wouldn’t have told you if I hadn’t thought you’d answer like that.”

He said, “It’s my youthful honesty.”

“No. It’s just that you’re relaxed. The ones that bust you for grass are the ones that twang like guitar strings. They’re upright and pious and I think their parents must all have been drunks.”

“It’s likely,” he said. “Tell me something, what does this mean—Enju, yutuhu nda?” He repeated it as accurately as he could remember it. The sounds weren’t unlike the Navajo but the words were strange.

She laughed off-key. “Who called you that?”

“A mountain in a satin shirt, driving a ’58 Ford pickup.”

“Jimmy Oto,” she said. “It stands to reason.”

So that was Jimmy Oto.

She said, “It means … well. Enju means anything you want it to mean. Like ‘well’ or ‘alors’ or ‘como’ or what do they say in Navajo, ‘yatahay’?”

“That’s pretty close.”

“‘Yutuhu’ means Navajo and I’m surprised you didn’t know that. ‘Nda’ means white man.

“That’s all?”

“Well the way Jimmy Oto would say it I imagine it would come out meaning something more than just Navajo white man. More like Navajo son-of-a-bitch Uncle Tomahawk selling out to the white man.”

“I could go home for that,” he said. “Here I thought he was putting the bad eye on me.”

“For him it would amount to that. His crowd doesn’t believe in the old stuff.”

“What about you?”

“I believe in all kinds of things. You’d be surprised.”

“I might at that. Some of the folks believe in it. Will Luxan said he’d heard Maria was witched to death.”

“Maybe she was,” Angelina said.

“Who by? And what for?”

“A lot of people don’t like my brother. And some of them maybe wanted him to break out of jail.”

He sat and waited for her to continue but she only fished in the pocket of her skirt and found a pack of cigarettes. She hunted around the dashboard and found the lighter and punched it. “This thing work?”

“I don’t know, I never use it.”

“Oh God. He doesn’t smoke. He drinks one beer. I’ll bet he eats spinach twice a week.”

The lighter popped. She pushed the glowing red end against the cigarette in her mouth and dragged suicidally to get it going. Watchman said, “A second ago you opened a can of worms.”

“I did?”

“Joe’s enemies. The ones who wanted him to escape. Who and why?”

“Because he didn’t kill Ross Calisher,” she said.

7.

“Okay. You wrote that letter to the Highway Patrol.”

“What letter?” She inhaled smoke, choked, recovered and said, “Quit looking at me like I’m a hundred pounds of poon.”

“The worms are starting to crawl out of the can, Angelina, and you’re the one who opened it when you sent us that letter. You may as well finish what you started.”

“You want a joint?”

“I’ll take a rain check.”

“I haven’t got them on me anyway. Not with a cop in the same car.”

He said, “Relax, I’m not going to search you. Now let’s talk about that letter. Why anonymous?”

“I’m his sister. If you knew I wrote it you’d ignore it— naturally his sister would think he was innocent.”

“That part didn’t work. We assumed you sent it.”

She made a face. “Well that’s not the point. The night Joe was supposedly slaughtering Ross Calisher up at Rand’s place I saw him up at Cibecue. He couldn’t have been both places at once.”

“You didn’t tell this to anybody at the time?”

“I told Joe. He told me to keep my mouth shut.”

“And you did what he told you, just like that.”

“It wasn’t like that. What do you take me for?”

“I’m still trying to sort that out,” he said.

“Joe said a lot of people would be in a lot of trouble if I said anything. He told me we could both get killed. I believed that.”

“Why?”

“Because somebody did get killed. Ross Calisher.”

“All right, so you kept your mouth shut then. Why open it now?”

“Because I think all bets are off now.”

“Where’d you get your secretarial training?”

“Phoenix,” she said. She gave him a surprised look.

“Okay. What do you mean, all bets are off?”

“Joe didn’t kill the man. They established the time of death and it was less than an hour after that when I saw Joe and Maria up in Cibecue. They had the baby in the car, they’d gone up to visit our cousin Jesse. But Jesse wasn’t home that night. He was sick, that’s why we were all worried about him, and Will Luxan was convinced somebody had witched Jesse. So they had Rufus Limita up there for a while throwing spells and they had a big sing. But Jesse wasn’t getting any better. Rufus is a pretty hip medicine man, he decided they ought to try the white hospital. That night when I got there they’d taken Jesse away to the hospital. I was leaving when I saw Joe and Maria drive in. They didn’t see me. I doubt they stayed any longer than I did, but I know what time it was and Joe couldn’t have been killing Ross Calisher because it’s a couple of hours’ drive from Cibecue to where Calisher lived.”

“You’re still not telling me what bets are off.”

“There must have been some kind of bargain. Don’t you get it?”

“Tell me about it.”

She was impatient. “Look, Joe confessed. He was, like, happy to go to jail for a murder he hadn’t committed— it had to be some part of a deal he made, don’t you see? Joe goes to jail and then all of a sudden Maria gets rich and moves down to Phoenix and the kid goes into private schools.”

“And you think somebody paid Joe to take the rap.”

“You know any other way to explain it?”

It fitted together well enough but it was all predicated on the assumption that Joe hadn’t killed Calisher and there was only Angelina’s word for that.

The cigarette tip dimmed when she took it away from her mouth; she waved it around with abandon. “It couldn’t have been any part of the deal for him to escape the way he did. They’d have to know it was going to make the police come up here and start asking a lot of questions. They wouldn’t want that.”

“All right,” he said. “That gets us to the grit. Who’s they?”

“If I knew that,” Angelina answered, “I think I’d have killed them myself.”

8.

Three Apaches emerged from the roadhouse and two of them glanced toward the Volvo. Angelina averted her face and held the glowing cigarette down below the dash. The three men crowded into the cab of a Dodge three-quarter-ton and drove out toward the road. When they made the turn their headlights swept across the Volvo and made Watchman squint.