A dying man is murdered. A rich man's wife agrees to pay three thousand dollars for the return of a stolen box of rocks. A series of odd, inexplicable events is haunting Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police and drawing him alone into the Bad Country of the merciless Southwest, where everything good struggles to survive, including Chee. An assassin waits for him there, protecting a thirty-year-old vision sired by greed and nourished by blood. And only one man will walk away.