Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 03] (3 page)

“You think the FBI missed something?” Leaphorn asked. “They screw it up?”

“They usually do,” Largo said. “Whether they did or not, it’s been long enough so we really ought to be checking around on it again.” He stared at Leaphorn. “You any better at that than at bringing in prisoners?” Leaphorn ignored the jibe. “Okay,” he said.

“You tell Window Rock you want me to work on the Atcitty case, and I’ll run over to Short Mountain and check on the Adams woman, too.

And I’ll owe you a favor.”

“Two favors,” Largo said. “What’s the other one?” Largo had put on a pair of horn-rimmed bifocals and was thumbing his way owlishly through the Atcitty report. “I didn’t hoorah you for letting that Begay boy get away. That’s the first one.

” He glanced at Leaphorn. “But I’m not so damn sure this second one’s any favor. Dreaming up reasons to borrow you from Window Rock so you can go chasing after that feller that tried to run you down.

That’s not so damned smart—getting mixed up in your own thing.

We’ll find that feller for you.” Leaphorn said nothing. Somewhere back in the subagency building there was a sudden metallic clamor—a jail inmate rattling something against the bars. Outside the west-facing windows of Largo’s office an old green pickup rolled down the asphalt road into Tuba City, trailing a thin haze of blue smoke.

Largo sighed and began sorting the Atcitty papers and tapes back into the file. “Herding Boy Scouts is not so bad,” Largo said.

“Broken leg or so. Few snakebites. One or two of them lost.” He glanced up at Leaphorn, frowning. “You got nothing much to go on, looking for that guy, anyway. You don’t even know what he looks like.

Goldrim glasses. Hell, I’m about the only one in this building that doesn’t wear ‘. And all you really know is that they were wire rims. Just seeing ‘ with that red blinker reflecting off of ‘- -that would distort the color.”

“You’re right,” Leaphorn said. “I’m right, but you’re going to go ahead on with it,” Largo said. “If I can find an excuse for you.” He tapped the remaining file with a blunt fingertip, changing the subject. “And here’s one that’s always popular—the vanishing helicopter,” Largo said. “The feds love that one. Every month we need to turn in a report telling ‘ we haven’t found it but we haven’t forgotten it. This time we’ve got a new sighting report to look into.” Leaphorn frowned. “A new one? Isn’t it getting kinda late for that?” Largo grinned. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “What’s a few months? Let’s see—it was December when we were running our asses off in the snow up and down the canyons, looking for it. So now it’s August, and somebody gets around to coming into Short Mountain and mentioning he’s seen the damn thing.”

Largo shrugged. “Nine months? That’s about right for a Short Mountain Navajo.” Leaphorn laughed. Short Mountain Navajos had a long-standing reputation among their fellow Dinee for being uncooperative, slow, cantankerous, witch-ridden and generally backward. “Three kinds of time.” Largo was still grinning. “On time, and Navajo time, and Short Mountain Navajo time.” The grin disappeared. “Mostly Bitter Water Dinee, and Salts, and Many Goats people live out there,” he said. It wasn’t exactly an explanation.

It was absolution from this criticism of the fifty-seven other Navajo clans, including the Slow Talking Dinee. The Slow Talking Dinee was Captain Howard Largo’s “born-to” clan. Leaphorn was also a member of the Slow Talking clan. That made him and Largo something akin to brothers in the Navajo Way, and explained why Leaphorn could ask Largo for a favor, and why Largo could hardly refuse to grant it.

“Funny people,” Leaphorn agreed. “Lots of Paiutes live back in there, ” Largo added. “Lots of marrying back and forth.” Largo’s face had resumed its usual glumness. “Even a lot of marrying with the Utes.”

Through the dusty window of Largo’s office Leaphorn had been watching a thunderhead building over Tuba Mesa. Now it produced a distant rumble of thunder, as if the Holy People themselves were protesting this mixing of the blood of the Dinee with their ancient enemies. “Anyway, the one who says she saw it wasn’t really nine months late,” Largo said. “She told a veterinarian out there looking at her sheep about it in June.” Largo paused and peered into the folder. his … And the vet told the feller then that drives the school bus out there, and he told Shorty Mcginnis about it back in July. And about three days ago, Tomas Charley was out there and Mcginnis told him.” Largo paused, and looked up at Leaphorn through his bifocals. “You know Mcginnis?” Leaphorn laughed. “From way back when I was new and working out of here. He was sort of a one-man radar stationstlistening poststgossip collector. I remember I used to think it wouldn’t be too hard to catch him doing something worth about ten years in stir. He still have that place up for sale?”

“That place has been for sale for forty years,” Largo said. “If somebody offered to buy it, it’d scare Mcginnis to death.”

“That sighting report,” Leaphorn said. “Anything helpful?”

“Naw,” Largo said. “She was driving her sheep out of a gully, and just as she came out of it, the copter came over just a few feet off the ground.

” Largo waved his hand impatiently at the file. “It’s all in there.

Scared the hell out of her. Her horse threw her and ran off and it scattered the sheep. Charley went to talk to her day before yesterday. Said she was still pissed off about it.”

“Was it the right copter?” Largo shrugged. “Blue and yellow or black and yellow.

She remembered that. And pretty big. And noisy. Maybe it was, and maybe it wasn’t.”

“Was it the right day?”

“Seemed to be,” Largo said.

“She was bringing in the sheep because she was taking her husband and the rest of the bunch to a Yeibachi over at Spider Rock the next day. Charley checked on it and the ceremonial was the day after the Santa Fe robbery. So that’s the right day.”

“What time?”

“That’s about right, too. Just getting dark, she said.” They thought about it. Outside there was thunder again. “Think we could have missed it?” Largo asked. “We could have,” Leaphorn said. “You could hide Kansas City out there. But I don’t think we did.”

“I don’t either,” Largo said. “You’d have to land it someplace where you can get someplace else from. Like near a road.”

“Exactly,” Leaphorn said.

“And if they left it near a road, somebody would have come across it by now.” Largo extracted a pack of Winstons from his shirt pocket, offered them to Leaphorn, and then lit one for himself. “It’s funny, though,” he said. “Yes,” Leaphorn said. The strangest part of it all, he thought, was how well the entire plan had stuck together, how well it had been coordinated, how well it had worked. You didn’t expect such meticulous planning from a militant political group—and the Buffalo Society was as militant as they get. It had split off from the American Indian Movement after the AIM’S seizure of Wounded Knee had fizzled away into nothing—accusing the movement’s leaders of being gutless. It had mailed out a formal declaration of war against the whites. It had pulled a series of bombings, and two kidnappings that Leaphorn could remember, and finally this affair at Santa Fe. There, a Wells Fargo armored truck leaving the First National Bank of Santa Fe had been detoured down one of Santa Fe’s narrow old streets by a man wearing a city policeman’s uniform.

Other Society members had simultaneously congealed downtown traffic to a motionless standstill by artfully placed detour signs. There had been a brief fight at the truck and a Society member had been critically wounded and left behind. But the gang had blasted off the truck door and escaped with almost $500,000. The copter had been reserved at the Santa Fe airport for a charter flight. It had taken off with a single passenger about the same moment the Wells Fargo truck had left the bank. It hadn’t been missed, in the excitement, until the pilot’s wife had called the charter company late that night worrying about her husband. Checking back the next day, police learned it had been seen taking off from the Sangre de Cristo Mountain foothills just east of Santa Fe about an hour after the robbery. It was seen, and definitely identified, a little later by a pilot approaching the Los Alamos airport. It had been headed almost due west, flying low. It had been seen—and almost definitely identified—about sundown by a Gas Company of New Mexico pipeline monitoring crew working northeast of Farmington. Again it was flying low and fast, and still heading west. A copter, this time identified only as black and yellow and flying low, had been reported by the driver of a Greyhound bus crossing U.S. 666 northwest of Shiprock.

These reports had been coupled with the fact that the missing copter’s full-tank range was only enough to fly it from Santa Fe to less than halfway across the Navajo Reservation and had caused the Navajo Police a full week of hard and fruitless searching. The FBI report on this affair showed the copter had been reserved by telephone the previous day in the name of the local engineering company which often chartered it, that a passenger had emerged from a blue Ford sedan and boarded the copter without anyone getting much of a look at him, and that the Ford had thereupon driven away. A check disclosed that the engineering company had not reserved the copter and there was absolutely nothing else to go on. The FBI noted that while it had no doubt the copter had been used to fly away seven large sacks of bulky cash, the connection was purely circumstantial. Again, the planning had been perfect. “Oh, well,” Largo said. He removed his glasses, frowned at them, ran his tongue over the lenses, polished them quickly with his handkerchief, and put them on again. He lowered his chin and peered at Leaphorn through the upper half of the bifocals. “Here they are,” he said, sliding the accordion files and the folder across the desktop. “Old heroin case, old homicide, old missing aircraft, and new “herd the tourist” job.”

“Thanks,” Leaphorn said. “For what?” Largo asked.

“Getting you into trouble? You know what I think, Joe? This isn’t smart at all, this getting personal about this guy. That ain’t good business in our line of work. Whyn’t you forget it and go on over to Window Rock and help take care of the Boy Scouts? We’ll catch this fellow for you.”

“You’re right,” Leaphorn said. He tried to think of a way to explain to Largo what he felt. Would Largo understand if Leaphorn described how the man had grinned as he tried to kill him?

Probably not, Leaphorn thought, because he didn’t understand it himself. “I’m right,” Largo said, “but you’re going after him anyway?” Leaphorn got up and walked to the window. The thunderhead was drifting eastward, trailing rain which didn’t quite reach the thirsty ground. The huge old cottonwoods that lined Tuba City’s single paved street looked dusty and wilted. “It’s not just getting even with him,” Leaphorn said to the window. “I think a guy that laughs when he tries to kill someone is dangerous. That’s a lot of it.” Largo nodded. “And a lot of it is that it doesn’t make sense to you. I know you, Joe. You’ve got to have everything sorted out so it’s natural. You got to know how come that guy left his car there and headed north on foot.” Largo smiled and made a huge gesture of dismissal. “Hell, man. He just got scared and ran for it. And he didn’t show up today hitchhiking because he got lost out there.

Another day he’ll come wandering up to some hogan begging for water.”

“Maybe,” Leaphorn said. “But nobody’s seen him. And his tracks didn’t wander. They headed due north—like he knew where he was going.”

“Maybe he did,” Largo said. “Figure it this way. This tourist … What’s the name of the Mercedes owner? This Frederick Lynch stops at a bar in Farmington, and one of those Short Mountain boys wanders out of the same bar, sees his car parked there, and drives it off. When you stopped him, he just dumped the car and headed home on foot.”

“That’s probably right,” Leaphorn said. On the way out, Leaphorn met the plump clerk coming in. She had two reports relayed by the Arizona State Police from Washington and Silver Spring, Maryland. Frederick Lynch lived at the address indicated on his car registration form, and was not known to Silver Spring police.

The only item on the record was a complaint that he kept vicious dogs. He was not now at home and was last reported seen by a neighbor seven days earlier. The other report was a negative reply from the stolen-car register. If the Lynch Mercedes had been stolen in Maryland, New Mexico or anywhere else, the crime had not yet been reported.

There is no way that one man, or one thousand men, can search effectively the wilderness of stony erosion which sprawls along the Utah-Arizona border south of the Rainbow Plateau. Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn didn’t try. Instead he found Corporal Emerson Bisti.

Corporal Bisti had been born at Kaibito Wash and spent his boyhood with his mother’s herds in the same country. Since the Korean War, he’d patrolled this same desert as a Navajo policeman. He went over Leaphorn’s map carefully, marking in all the places where water could be found. There weren’t many. Then Bisti went over the map again and checked off those that dried up after the spring runoff, or that held water only a few weeks after rainstorms. That left only eleven. Two were at trading posts—Navajo Springs and Short Mountain.

One was at Tsai Skizzi Rock and one was a well drilled by the Tribal Council to supply the Zilnez Chapter House. A stranger couldn’t approach any of these places without being noticed, and Captain Largo’s patrolmen had checked them all. By late afternoon, Leaphorn had pared the remaining seven down to four. At the first three watering places he had found a maze of tracks— sheep, horses, humans, dogs, coyotes, and the prints of the menagerie of small mammals and reptiles that teem in the most barren deserts. The tracks of the man who had abandoned the Mercedes were not among them.

Nor were any of the dog tracks large enough to match those Leaphorn had found at the abandoned Mercedes. Even with Bisti’s markings on his map, Leaphorn almost missed the next watering place. The first three had been easy enough to locate—marked either by the animal trails that radiated from them or by the cottonwoods they sustained in a landscape otherwise too arid for greenery. But Bisti’s tiny it put the fourth one in a trackless world of red Chinle sandstone. The long-abandoned wagon track that led toward this spring had been easy to find. Leaphorn had jolted down the seven point eight miles specified by Bisti’s instructions and parked at a great outcropping of black shale as advised. Then he had walked two miles northeast by east toward the red butte which Bisti said overlooked the water hole.