Gallagher was silent for a few minutes, then he added, “It’s already begun. Over at Mexican Hat. Woman in a store over there asked about Erik Hokart. Wondered where he was, and then added that he was probably out on the mesa with you. She added that if anybody knew where he was it would be you.”
“A woman said that?”
“Uh-huh. Nice-lookin’ woman whom they didn’t know but they said she’d been in before. Looked like a city woman.”
“Eden Foster?”
“Sounded like her. Looks to me like some folks may not wait for suspicion to grow. They’d just help it along a bit.”
Mike Raglan thought about it. The question Eden Foster asked would be repeated, and of course, that was as planned. When Erik did not appear, suspicion would grow. She did not need to accuse, only to ask a few questions and start people wondering.
“See what I mean? If I give them your answers they’d put me in a booby hatch, and I wouldn’t blame them.” He looked across the corner of the table at Raglan. “Seems to me you’re in trouble, my friend. If you’re coming up with any answers it had better be quick.”
Raglan knew he should leave here now. He should check out of the motel, drive back to Tamarron, cheek out there, and catch a plane for Denver and then New York.
After all, what was Erik to him? Hokart was just a man whom he knew, like many others. Of course, the thing he could not escape was the fact that Erik had called on him for help. The man was alone, faced by God knew what in the way of enemies. Of course, if Mike went on, he would have the same enemies.
He got up. “See you, Gallagher.” He turned toward the door.
“You going out there?”
“What else can I do? Cut and run? He trusted me to get him out of this, and there isn’t anybody else.”
“There’s me,” Gallagher replied.
“You’re an officer, with a duty to a community, and no telling what will come of this. Besides, I’d rather have you on the outside. I may need help.”
“What did you mean when you said there’s ‘no telling what will come of this’?”
Raglan walked back to the table and spoke more quietly. “Gallagher, think about it. Supposing a lot of them come through some night? Without warning? You’ve got a small town here. They know how many you are and what your communications are. Supposing they decided to come over?”
Gallagher stared at him. “Now you’re really going off the deep end. Why would they do a thing like that?”
“I don’t for a minute believe they will. It was just an idea, but how many would it take to descend on a sleeping town?”
“More than they are likely to have,” Gallagher said. “Everybody in this town has a gun, most of them two or three. These folks do a lot of hunting in season, so they not only have weapons but they know how to use them and when.”
Raglan walked to the cash register and paid the bill, then walked out into the sunlight. Gallagher followed him. “Damn it, man, why’d you have to bring up an idea like that? Now you’ve got me worried.”
“Look, I doubt if you believe any of this, and I don’t know what to believe myself. It was just one idea following another. The legend is that the Anasazi left the Third World because it became evil.
“Evil in what way? What did they think of as evil? The Aztecs, the Mayas, and some other Indians from south of here believed in human sacrifice. According to the best reports they sacrificed literally thousands of people. Is that what they meant by evil? Did they think of human sacrifice as evil? Probably not, as it was a religious rite.”
They stood on the curb near Raglan’s car. “Gallagher, I don’t know what to believe. I’m a confirmed skeptic, but that doesn’t blind me to the fact there’s a lot we don’t know. We’re only beginning to learn about this world, and believe me, the ideas of our grandchildren will be altogether different from our own. They will take things for granted of which we know nothing now.
“The world is changing fast. When I was a youngster there were still a hundred jobs a man could do who had no education. Most of them have vanished. It’s not even a machine world as we knew it. Now it’s a computer world, and if you don’t have education and the ability to adapt you’re out of it. You either get an education or find a place on skid row.”
“Maybe.”
“You’ve seen Mesa Verde, Gallagher. That culture lasted a thousand years at least. Do you think they doubted it would last forever? When someone looks at Mesa Verde and the ruins left by the Anasazi, he should not just wonder at them but he should think of what they must have thought. What did they believe? We can reconstruct their world from the artifacts that have been found, and we know how they lived, but what did they think? How much did they know about other Indians? Probably there was interchange of trade goods and ideas with the Hohokam or the Mogollon cultures. There seems to have been some trade as far away as Central America. They’ve found mummified parrots in the ruins and other evidences of trade.
“Did they know anything about the Mound Builders? What did they know of eastern Indians? And were any of the eastern Indians actually living where the white man first found them?”
“So you going back down there?”
“Leaving now. Soon as I can pick up a few supplies at the store.”
“Be careful, Raglan, and for God’s sake, don’t you disappear! I’ll have trouble enough explaining Hokart!”
He was still standing on the curb as Raglan drove away, and in the rearview mirror Mike saw him take off his cap and run his fingers through his hair, then walk back inside.
A half hour later, with Chief sitting beside him, Raglan was headed back for the mesa.
And he did not want to go. He just didn’t want to go at all.
XVII
The road was empty, and he stepped on the gas. He wanted to get off the highway and into the desert as quickly as possible. So far there was no indication that he was followed or observed, but there was always a chance that somebody was already down the road or out in the desert awaiting him.
The day was hot and still. Heat waves shimmered in the near distance. He turned on the air conditioning, and Chief made a try at curling up in the seat beside him but it proved impossible. There was simply too much of him and he lopped over, resting his big head on Mike’s thigh again. Raglan did not like that very much, as it made it more difficult to get at his gun. He picked it up and put it between his legs where it would be quicker to grasp.
At first there was much cedar alongside the road, but it thinned out and then disappeared, giving way to sparse brush and cactus. A car appeared in the road ahead of him, a camper with a man and a woman in the front seat. The woman was driving. Moments later he saw them disappear to the left over a low hill.
The turnoff, a scarcely visible set of tire tracks, lay right ahead. Slowing down, he made the turn. The highway was empty and the trail on which he now drove seemed to show no fresh signs of travel. He slowed down still more, for the road had many dips and bends. Chief sat up, watching the road, suddenly alert. With the windows closed and the air conditioning on, there was small chance he had smelled anything, yet he seemed to know where they were going.
Raglan’s thoughts returned to the problem. If there was more than one opening to the Other Side, as there seemed to be, where were they? Kawasi had implied there were occasional, erratic openings that permitted passage.
What was it like over there, and what rules, if any, governed the openings? The window in the kiva seemed to be an opening that was or had been stabilized. But what of the others? And where were they?
Johnny had gotten through by accident but in all the years since had not been able to discover a way to return.
Mike pulled up on the crest of a hill and slowly checked the area around him, examining every clump of brush, every cedar, every rock formation. By coming here alone he was walking right into their hands, yet there was no other place that held a clue to Erik and his whereabouts.
It was very still. Turning, he looked back the way he had come. The road was empty, just a narrow, winding way among boulders, brush, and outcroppings of sandstone. Uneasily, he looked around. He had always loved the desert, its vast distances, the silence, the creatures that knew how to survive, for if nothing else, the desert was a place of survival. Everything that lived in the desert had found some pattern for survival, some means of adapting to the heat, the cold, and the lack of water. Each in its own way had found a means to conserve moisture.