Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 12] (6 page)

A
S IT HAPPENED, OFFICER MANUELITO didn’t get to the office.

“She says she’s stuck,” Jenifer reported. “She went out Route 5010 south of Rattlesnake and turned off on that dirt track that skirts around the west side of Ship Rock. Then she slid off into a ditch.” This amused Jenifer, who chuckled. “I’ll see if I can get somebody to go pull her out.”

“I think I’ll just take care of it myself,” Chee said. “But thanks anyway.”

He pulled on his jacket. What the devil was Manuelito doing out in that empty landscape by the Rock with Wings? He’d told her to work her way down a list of people who might be willing to talk about gang membership at Shiprock High School, not practicing her skill at driving in mud.

Just getting out of the parking lot demonstrated to Chee how Manuelito could manage to get stuck. The overnight storm had drifted eastward, leaving the town of Shiprock under a cloudless sky. The temperature was already well above freezing and the sun was making short work of the snow. But even after he shifted into four-wheel drive, Chee’s truck did some wheel-spinning. The ditches beside the highway were already carrying runoff water and a cloud of white steam swirled over the asphalt where the moisture was evaporating.

Navajo Route 5010, according to the road map, was “improved.” Which meant it was graded now and then and in theory at least had a gravel surface. On a busy day, probably six or eight vehicles would use it. This morning, Officer Manuelito’s patrol car had been the first to leave its tracks in the snow and Chee’s pickup was number two. Chee noted approvingly that she had made a slow and careful left turn off of 5010 onto an unnumbered access road that led toward Ship Rock—thereby leaving no skid marks. He made the same turn, felt his rear wheels slipping, corrected, and eased the truck gingerly down the road.

All muscles were tense, all senses alert. He was enjoying testing his skill against the slick road surface. Enjoying the clean, cold air in his lungs, the gray-and-white patterns of soft snow on sage and salt bush and chamisa, enjoying the beauty, the vast emptiness, and a silence broken only by the sound of his truck’s engine and its tires in the mud. The immense basalt monolith of Ship Rock towered beside him, its west face still untouched by the warming sun and thus still coated with its whitewash of snow. The Fallen Man must have prayed for that sort of moisture before his thirst killed him on that lonely ledge.

Then the truck topped a hillock, and there was Officer Bernadette Manuelito, a tiny figure standing beside her stuck patrol car, representing an unsolved administrative problem, the end of joy, and a reminder of how good life had been when he was just a patrolman. Ah, well, there was a bright side. Even from here he could see that Manuelito had stuck her car so thoroughly that there would be no hope of towing it out with his vehicle. He’d simply give her a ride back to the office and send out a tow truck.

Officer Manuelito had seemed to Lieutenant Jim Chee to be both unusually pretty and unusually young to be wearing a Navajo Tribal Police uniform. This morning she wouldn’t have made that impression. She looked tired and disheveled and at least her age, which Chee knew from her personnel records was twenty-six years. She also looked surly. He leaned across the pickup seat and opened the door for her.

“Tough luck,” he said. “Get your stuff out of it, and the weapons, and lock it up. We’ll send out a tow truck to get it when the mud dries.”

Officer Manuelito had prepared an explanation of how this happened and would not be deterred.

“The snow covered up a little wash, there. Drifted it full so you couldn’t see it. And…”

“It could happen to anybody,” Chee said. “Let’s go.”

“You didn’t bring a tow chain?”

“I did bring a tow chain,” Chee said. “But look at it. There’s no traction now. It’s clay and it’s too soft.”

“You have four-wheel drive,” she said.

“I know,” Chee said, feeling in no mood to debate this. “But that just means you dig yourself in by spinning four wheels instead of two. I couldn’t budge it. Get your stuff and get in.”

Officer Manuelito brushed a lock of hair off her forehead, leaving a streak of gray mud. Her lips parted with a response, then closed. “Yes, sir,” she said.

That was all she said. Chee backed the pickup to a rocky place, turned it, and slipped and slid his way back to 5010 in leaden silence. Back on the gravel, he said:

“Did you know that Diamonte filed a complaint against you? Charged you with harassment.”

Officer Manuelito was staring out the windshield. “No,” she said. “But I knew he said he was going to.”

“Yep,” Chee said. “He did. Said you were hanging around. Bothering his customers.”

“His dope buyers.”

“Some of them, probably,” Chee said.

Manuelito stared relentlessly out of the windshield.

“What were you doing?” Chee asked.

“You mean besides harassing his customers?”

“Besides that,” Chee said, thinking that the very first thing he would do when they got back to the office was approve this woman’s transfer to anywhere. Preferably to Tuba City, which was about as far as he could get her from Shiprock. He glanced at her, waiting for a reply. She was still focused on the windshield.

“You know what he runs out there?” she said.

“I know what he used to do when I was assigned here before,” Chee said. “In those days he wholesaled booze to the reservation bootleggers, fenced stolen property, handled some marijuana. Things like that. Now I understand he’s branched out into more serious dope.”

“That’s right,” she said. “He still supplies the creeps who push pot and now he’s selling the worse stuff, too.”

“That’s what I always heard,” Chee said. “And most recently from Teddy Begayaye. The kid Begayaye picked up at the community college last week named Diamonte as his source for coke. But then he changed his mind and decided he just couldn’t remember where he got it.”

“I know Diamonte’s selling it.”

“So you bring in your evidence. We take it to the captain, he takes it to the federal prosecutors, or maybe the San Juan County cops, and we put the bastard in jail.”

“Sure,” Manuelito said.

“But we don’t go out there, with no evidence, and harass his customers. There’s a law against it.”

Chee sensed that she was no longer staring at the windshield. She was looking at him.

“I heard that you did,” she said. “When you were a cop here before.”

Chee felt his face flushing. “Who told you that?”

“Captain Largo told us when we were in recruit training.”

The son of a bitch, Chee thought.

“Largo was using me as a bad example?”

“He didn’t say who did it. But I asked around. People said it was you.”

“It just about got me kicked out of the police,” Chee said. “The same thing could happen to you.”

“I heard it got the place shut down, too,” Manuelito said.

“Yeah, and about the time I got off suspension, he was going full blast again.”

“Still…” Manuelito said. And let the thought trail off.

“Don’t say ‘still.’ You stay away from there. It’s Begayaye’s job, looking into the dope situation. If you run across anything useful, tell Teddy. Or tell me. Don’t go freelancing around.”

“Yes, sir,” Manuelito said, sounding very formal.

“I mean it,” Chee said. “I’ll put a letter in your file reporting these instructions.”

“Yes, sir,” Manuelito said.

“Now. What’s this transfer request about? What’s wrong with Shiprock? And where do you want to go?”

“I don’t care. Anywhere.”

That surprised Chee. He’d guessed Manuelito wanted to be closer to a boyfriend somewhere. Or that her mother was sick. Something like that. But now he remembered that she was from Red Rock. By Big Rez standards, Shiprock was conveniently close to her family.

“Is there something about Shiprock you don’t like?”

That question produced a long silence, and finally:

“I just want to get away from here.”

“Why?”

“It’s a personal reason,” she said. “I don’t have to say why, do I? It’s not in the personnel rules.”

“I guess not,” Chee said. “Anyway, I’ll approve it.”

“Thank you,” Manuelito said.

“That’s no guarantee you’ll get it, though. You know how it works. Largo may kill it. And there has to be the right kind of opening somewhere. You’ll have to be patient.”

Officer Manuelito was pointing out the window. “Did you notice that?” she asked.

All Chee saw was the grassland rolling away toward the great dark shape of Ship Rock.

“I mean the fence,” she said. “There where that wash runs down into the borrow ditch. Notice the posts.”

Chee noticed the posts, two of which were leaning sharply. He stopped the pickup.

“Somebody dug at the base of the posts,” she said. “Loosened them so you could pull them up.”

“And lay the fence down?”

“More likely raise it up,” she said. “Then you could drive cows down the wash and right under it.”

“Do you know whose grazing lease this is?”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “A man named Maryboy has it.”

“Has he lost any cattle?”

“I don’t know. Not lately, anyway. At least I haven’t seen a report on it.”

Chee climbed out of the truck, plodded through the snow, and tried the posts. They lifted easily but the snow made it impossible to determine exactly why. He thought about Zorro, Mr. Finch’s favorite cow thief.

Manuelito was standing beside him.

“See?” she said.

“When did you notice this?”

“I don’t know,” Officer Manuelito said. “Just a few days ago.”

“If I remember right, just a few days ago— and today, too—you were supposed to be running down that list of people at that dance. Looking for anyone willing to tell us about gang membership. About what they saw. Who’d tell us who had the gun. Who shot it. That sort of thing. Is that right? That was number one on the list you were handed after the staff meeting.”

“Yes, sir,” Officer Manuelito said, proving she could sound meek if she wanted to. She was looking down at her hands.

“Do any of those possible witnesses live out here?”

“Well, not exactly. The Roanhorse couple is on the list. They live over near Burnham.”

“Near Burnham?” The Burnham trading post was way to hell south of here. Down Highway 666.

“I sort of detoured over this way,” Manuelito explained uneasily. “We had that report that Lucy Sam had lost some cattle, and I knew the captain was after you about catching somebody and putting a stop to that and—”

“How did you know that?”

Now Manuelito’s face was a little flushed. “Well,” she said. “You know how people talk about things.”

Yes, Chee knew about that.

“Are you telling me you just drove out here blind? What were you looking for?”

“Well,” she said. “I was just sort of looking.”

Chee waited. “Just sort of looking?”

“Well,” she said. “I remembered my grandfather telling me about Hosteen Sam. That was Lucy’s father. About him hating it when white people came out here to climb Ship Rock. They would park out there, over that little rise there by the foot of the cliff. He would write down their license number or what the car looked like and when he went into town he would go by the police station and try to get the police to arrest them for trespassing. So when I was assigned here, and one of the problems worrying the captain was people stealing cattle, I came out here to ask Hosteen Sam if he would keep track of strange pickups and trucks for us.”

“Pretty good idea,” Chee said. “What did he say?”

“He was dead. Died last year. But his daughter said she would do it for me and I gave her a little notebook for it, but she said she had the one her father had used. So, anyway, I thought I would just make a little detour by there and see if she had written down anything for us.”

“Quite a little detour,” Chee said. “I’d say about sixty miles or so. Had she?”

“I don’t know. I noticed some other posts leaning over and I decided to pull off and see if they had been cut off or dug up or anything else funny. And then I got stuck.”

It was a clever idea, Chee was thinking. He should have thought of it himself. He’d see if he could find some people to keep a similar eye on things up near the Ute reservation, and over on the Checkerboard. Wherever people were losing cattle. Who could he get? But he was distracted from that thought. His feet, buried to the ankles in the melting snow, were complaining about the cold. And the sun had now risen far enough to illuminate a different set of snowfields high above them on Ship Rock. They reflected a dazzling white light.

Officer Manuelito was watching him. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” she said. Tse’ Bit’ a’ i’. It never seems to look the same.”

“I remember noticing that when I was a little boy and I was staying for a while with an aunt over near Toadlena,” Chee said. “I thought it was alive.”

Officer Manuelito was staring at it. “Beautiful,” she said, and shuddered. “I wonder what he was doing up there. All alone.”

“The Fallen Man?”

“Deejay doesn’t think he fell. He said no bones were broken and if you’d fallen down that cliff it would break something. Deejay thinks he was climbing with somebody and they just stranded him there.”

“Who knows?” Chee said. “Anyway, it’s not in the books as anything but an accidental death. No evidence of foul play. We don’t have to worry about it.” Chee’s feet were telling him that his boots were leaking. Leaking ice water. “Let’s go,” he said, heading back for his truck.

Officer Manuelito was still standing there, staring up at the cliffs towering above her.

“They say Monster Slayer couldn’t get down either. When he climbed up to the top and killed the Winged Monster he couldn’t get down.”

“Come on,” Chee said. He climbed into the truck and started the engine, thinking that you’d have a better chance if you were a spirit like Monster Slayer. When spirits scream for help other spirits hear them. Spider Woman had heard and came to the rescue. But Harold Breedlove could have called forever with nothing but the ravens to hear him. The stuff of bad dreams.

They drove in silence.