Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 05] by The Dark Wind (v1.1) [html]

could see only the shape of the yellow light imprinted on his iris. The shape of the man was lost to him. He ducked behind the chamiso again, waiting for vision to return.
    When it did, the arroyo was empty.
    Chee waited for the first dim light before he made his move for his truck. His first impulse was to abandon it. To slip away in the darkness and make the long walk back to the Burnt Water Trading Post and thereby avoid the risk that the man who had hunted him in the darkness was waiting for him at the truck. But as time ticked away, the urgency and reality of the danger diminished with it. Within an hour, what his instincts had told him of danger had faded along with the adrenaline it had pumped into his blood. What had happened was easy enough to read. Someone interested in recovering the drugs had rented a plane to keep an eye on the area. Chee's lights had been seen. Someone had been sent to find him and learn what he was doing. The pistol in hand was easily explained. The hunter was seeking the unknown in a strange and lonely darkness. He was nervous. He would have seen Chee's rifle on its rear-window rack but he'd have had no way of knowing Chee's pistol was locked away.
    Even so, Chee was cautious. He moved along the arroyo rim to a point where he could look down at the truck. He spent a quarter of an hour sitting in the shelter of the rocks there, watching for any sign of movement. All he saw was a burrowing owl returning from its nocturnal hunt to its hole in the bank across from him. The owl scouted the truck and the area around it. If it saw anything dangerous, it showed no sign of it until it saw Chee. Then it shied violently away. That was enough for Jim Chee. He got up and walked to the truck.
    With his pistol back on his belt, Chee checked the area around the arroyo mouth to confirm what the burrowing owl had told him. Nothing human was watching the area. Then he took a look at the tracks his hunter had left. The man wore boots with worn waffle soles, the same soles he'd noticed at the site of the crash. Someone in these same boots had placed the fatal lanterns. He'd approached the truck from downwash, left tracks all around it, and then walked almost a half mile up the arroyo and back again. Finally he'd left the way he had come.
    Chee spent the rest of the morning examining the two downwash arroyos which the map suggested might have offered hiding places for a car. Nothing that left tire tracks had gone up either of them. He sat in the truck cab, finished the last of his crackers with the last of his water, and thought it all through again. Then he went back to both arroyos, walked a half mile up from their mouths, and made an intensive hands-and-knees spot check of likely places. Nothing. That eliminated the possibility that Palanzer, or Musket, or whoever was driving, had done a thorough and meticulous job of wiping out tracks at the turn-in point. With that out of the way, he drove back up to the arroyo where he'd spent the night.
    Once it had been his favorite prospect. But he'd written it off, just as he had first written off the downstream arroyos when he'd found no trace of tracks at the mouth. Now he intended to be absolutely sure, and when he was finished, he would be equally sure that no car was hidden up Wepo Wash. Chee skipped the first hundred yards, which he'd already studied fruitlessly. Upstream the arroyo had cut through an extensive bed of hard-packed caliche. Here there were only occasional pockets of sand and Chee inspected those which couldn't have been avoided by a wheeled vehicle. He took his time. He found lizard tracks, and the trail left by a rattlesnake, the tiny paw marks of kangaroo rats, the marks left by birds and a variety of rodents. No tire marks. At a broad expanse of packed sand another hundred yards upstream, he made the same sort of check. Here he found a scratch curving across the sandy surface. Parallel with it were other lines, almost invisible. Chee squatted on his