Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 14] (11 page)

“Cabot called in,” he shouted. “Says you guys can take off now. He
wants you back here in the morning. About daylight.”

Dashee waved good-bye. The communications tech returned to his
reading. Chee said, “Does this somehow remind you of our Great Manhunt
of 1998?”

Dashee backed his car up to the track, turned it in the direction of
the wandering road that would take them back to pavement.

“Hold it a minute,” Chee said. “Let’s sit here a little while where
we can see the lay of the land and think about this.”

“Think?” Dashee said. “You’re not an acting lieutenant anymore. That
thinking can get you in trouble.“ But he pulled the car off the track
and turned off the ignition.

They sat. After a while Dashee said, “What are you thinking about?
I’m thinking about how early we have to hit the floor tomorrow to get
up by daylight. How about you?”

“I’m thinking this started out looking like a well-planned
operation. Everything was timed out precisely." Chee looked at Dashee,
meshed his fingers together. “Perfect precision,” he said. “You agree.”

Dashee nodded.

“The guy on the roof cuts the right wires at the right time. They
use a stolen truck with the plates switched, shooting both of the
competent security people. They leave total confusion behind, fixing it
so they were far away from the scene before roadblocks were up, and so
forth. Everything planned. Right?"

“And now this." Chee waved at the landscape in front of them, dunes
stabilized by growths of Mormon tea, stunted junipers, needle grass,
and then westward where the Casa Del Eco highlands dropped sharply away
into a waste of eroded canyons.

“So?” Dashee asked.

“So why did they come here?”

“Tell me,” Dashee said, "and then let’s go back to Montezuma Creek
and get a loaf of bread and some lunch meat at the store there and have
our dinner.”

“Well, first you think maybe they panicked. Figured they’d run into
roadblocks if they stayed on the pavement, turned off here, found this
old track dead-ended, and just took off.”

“OK,” Dashee said. “Let’s go get something to eat.”

“But that doesn’t work because all three of them lived around here,
and that Ironhand guy is a Ute. He’d know every road out here. They had
a reason to come here.”

“All right,” Dashee said. “So they came here to steal Old Man
Timms’s airplane and fly out of our jurisdiction. The FBI liked that
one. I liked that one. Everybody liked that one until you went and
screwed it up.”

“Call that reason number two, then, and mark it wrong. Now reason
number three, currently in favor, is this is the place they had picked
to climb down into the canyons and disappear.”

Dashee restarted the engine. “Funny place for that, I’d say, but
let’s think about it while we eat.”

“I’d guess this drainage wash here would take you down into Gothic
Creek, and then you could follow it all the way down to the San Juan
River Canyon, and then if you can get across the river you could go up
Butler Wash to just about anywhere. Or downstream a few miles and turn
south again up the Chinle Canyon. Lots of places to hide out, but this
is sort of an awkward, out-of-the-way place to start walking.”

Dashee shifted into second as they rolled down a rocky slope where
the track connected to what the map called ‘unimproved road.'

“If they planned to hole up in the canyons, I’ll bet you they knew
what they were doing,” Dashee said.

“I guess so. But then how about Jorie getting out of the truck here
and going right home. That’s a long way to walk.”

“Drop it,” Dashee said. “After I eat something and my stomach stops
growling at me, I’ll explain it all to you.”

“I want to know how Lieutenant Leaphorn got those identities,” Chee
said. “I’m going to find out.”

Chee scanned the tables in the Anasazi Inn dining room twice. He had
looked right past the corner table and the stocky old duffer sitting
there with a plump middle-aged woman without recognizing Joe Leaphorn.
When he did recognize him on the second take, it came as a sort of a
shock. He had seen the Legendary Lieutenant in civilian attire before,
but the image he carried in his mind was of Leaphorn in uniform,
Leaphorn strictly businesslike, Leaphorn deep in thought. This fellow
was laughing at something the woman with him had said.

Chee hadn’t expected the woman—although he should have. When he’d
called Leaphorn’s home the answering machine had said, “I’ll be in the
Anasazi Inn dining room at eight.” No preamble, no good-bye, just the
ten words required. The Legendary Lieutenant at his efficient best,
expecting a call, unable to wait for it, rewording his answering
machine answer to deal with the problem, handling an affair of the
heart, if such it was, just as he’d handle a meeting with a district
attorney. The woman dining with him he now recognized as the professor
from Northern Arizona University with whom Leaphorn seemed to have
something or other going. He wasn’t accustomed to thinking of Leaphorn
in any sort of romantic situation. Nor to seeing him laughing. That was
rare.

What wasn’t rare was the effect this man had on him. Chee had
considered it on the drive down to Farmington, had decided he was
probably over it by now. He’d had the same feeling as a boy when
Hosteen Nakai began teaching him about the Navajo relationship with the
world, and at the University of New Mexico when in the presence of the
famed Alaska Jack Campbell, who was teaching him early Athabascan
culture in Anthropology 209.

He’d tried to describe it to Cowboy, and Cowboy had said, “You mean
like a rookie reporting for basketball practice with Michael Jordan, or
like a seminary student put on a committee with the pope.” And, yes,
that was close enough. And no, he hadn’t quite gotten over it.

Leaphorn spotted him, got up, waved him over, said, “You remember
Louisa, I’m sure,” and asked him if he’d like something to drink. Chee,
already wired with about six cups of coffee since breakfast, said he’d
settle for iced tea.

“I figured out how you knew where to find me,” Leaphorn said. “You
called my house, and got my machine, and it played you the message I’d
subbed in to tell Louisa where I’d meet her.”

“Right,” Chee said. “And that saved me about a hundred miles of
driving. Getting all the way down to Window Rock. Two hundred, because
I’ve got to get back to Montezuma Creek in the morning.”

“We’ll be going in that direction, too,” Leaphorn said. “Professor
Bourebonette’s been using me as translator. She’s interviewing an old
woman over at the Beclabito Day School tomorrow.”

They talked about that until the time came to order dinner.

“Did the desk give you the message I left for you?” Chee said.

“You want to know what I can tell you about the Ute Casino
business,” Leaphorn said. “Are you forgetting that I’m a civilian these
days?”

“No,” Chee said, and smiled. “Nor am I forgetting how you used to
make your good-old-boy network deliver. And I hear it was you who
provided the identification of those guys to the FBI.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Got it from an Apache County deputy sheriff.”

Leaphorn’s expression suggested he knew which deputy.

“Anyway, it’s like most rumors,” Leaphorn said, and shrugged.

“You gentlemen want me to go powder my nose?” the professor asked.
“Give you some privacy?”

“Not me,” Leaphorn said, and Chee shook his head.

“What you mean is that it’s partly true? According to the story I
heard you went out to this Jorie fellow’s place, found him dead, called
in to report he’d committed suicide and gave the feds the names of his
accomplices. Could you tell me how much of that is true?”

“You’re working on this, I guess,” Leaphorn said. “How much have
they told you?”

“Not much,” Chee said, and filled him in.

“They didn’t tell you about the suicide note?”

“No,” Chee said. “They didn’t.”

Leaphorn shook his head and looked disappointed. “Lot of good people
work in the FBI,” he said. “Lot of dumb ones, too, and the way it works
as a bureaucracy gets bigger and bigger and bigger, the dumber you are
the higher you rise. They get caught up in the Washington competition,
where knowledge is power. That gets them obsessed with secrecy.”

“I guess so,” Chee said.

“This obsession for secrecy,” Leaphorn said, shaking his head. “I
used to work with a Special Agent named Kennedy,” he added, no longer
grinning. “A great cop, Kennedy. He explained to me how it grew out of
the turf wars in Washington. The Bureau, and the Treasury cops, and
CIA, and the Secret Service, and U.S. Marshal’s Office, and the BIA,
and Immigration and Naturalization cops, and about fifteen other
federal law-enforcement agencies pushing and shoving each other for
more money and more jurisdiction. 'Knowledge is Power,' Kennedy’d say,
so you get conditioned not to tell anybody anything. They might steal
the headlines, and the TV time, from your agency.”

Chee nodded. “This suicide note,” he said. “Anything in it I should
know?” Leaphorn, he was thinking, must be showing his age, or too much
living alone. He didn’t used to ramble off into such digressions.

“Maybe. Maybe not. But how do you know if you don’t know what’s in
it?”

“Well, I do have a question about this Jorie. I’d like to understand
how he got home from where he and his buddies left their truck. And I’d
like to know, if he was going home anyway, why he didn’t just have them
drop him off there?”

Leaphorn looked thoughtful.

“Just two men in the truck when it was abandoned, then? You found
the tracks?”

“Not me,” Chee said. “I wasn’t back from vacation. Sheriff’s
department people. Cowboy Dashee, in fact. You remember him?”

“Sure,” Leaphorn said. “And Cowboy said two sets of tracks around
the truck?”

“He said two was all he found. He photographed them. One set of
slick-soled boots with cowboy heels, one set that looked like those
nonskid walking shoes.”

Leaphorn thought about that. “What else did Dashee find?”

“Around the truck?”

“Or in it. Anything interesting.”

“It was a stolen oil-field truck,” Chee said. “Had all that sort of
stuff in it. Wrenches, oily rags, so forth.”

Leaphorn waited for more, made a wry, apologetic face.

“Remember how I used to be?” he said. “Always after you to give me
all the details. Not leave anything out. Even if it didn’t seem to mean
anything.”

Chee grinned. “I do,” he said. “And I remember I used to resent it.
Felt like it meant I couldn’t do the thinking on my own. Come to think
of it, I still do.”

“It wasn’t that,” Leaphorn said, his face a little flushed. “It was
just that a lot of times I’d have access to information you didn’t
have.”

“Well, anyway, I didn’t mention a girlie magazine in a door pocket,
and some receipts for gasoline purchases, a broken radio in the truck
bed, an oil-wipe rag and an empty Dr Pepper can.”

Leaphorn thought, said, “Tell me about the radio.”

“The radio? Dashee said it wouldn’t play. It looked new. Looked
expensive. But it didn’t work. He figured the battery must be dead.”

Leaphorn thought again. “Seems funny they’d go off and leave
something like that. They must have brought it along for a reason.
Probably wanted to use it to keep track of what the cops were doing.
Did it have a scanner, so they could monitor police radio traffic?”

“Damn,” Chee said. “Dashee didn’t say, and I didn’t think to ask
him.”

Leaphorn glanced at Professor Bourebonette, looking apologetic.

“Go ahead,” she said. “I always wondered how you guys do your work.”

“Not in a restaurant usually,” Leaphorn said. “But I wish I had a
map.”

“Lieutenant,” Chee said, reaching for his jacket pocket, ”can you
imagine me coming in here to talk to you and not bringing a map?”

The waitress arrived while Leaphorn was spreading the map over the
tablecloth. She made a patient face, took their orders and went away.

“OK,” Leaphorn said. He drew a small, precise X. “Here we have
Jorie’s place. Now, where did the men get out of the pickup?”

“I’d say right here,” Chee said, and indicated the spot with a tine
of his fork.

“Right beside that unimproved road?”

“No. Several hundred yards down a slope. Toward that Gothic Creek
drainage.”

The map they were using was THE MAP, produced years ago by the
Automobile Club of Southern California, adopted by the American
Automobile Association as its ‘Guide to Indian Country’ and
meticulously revised and modified year by year as bankruptcy forced yet
another trading post to close, dirt roads became paved, flash floods
converted ‘unimproved’ routes to ‘impassable,' and so forth. Leaphorn
refolded it now to the mileage scale, transferred that to the margin of
his paper napkin and applied that to measure the spaces between X’s.

“About twenty miles as the crow flies,” Leaphorn said. “Make it
thirty on foot because you have to detour around canyons.”

“It seemed to me an awful long way to walk if you don’t have to,”
Chee said. “And then there’s more questions.”

“I think I have the answer to one of them,” Leaphorn said. “If you
want to believe it.”

“It’s really a sort of bundle of questions,” Chee said. “Jorie went
home. So I guess we can presume he was sure the cops wouldn’t be coming
after him. Didn’t have him identified. So forth. So how was he
identified? And how did he know he’d been identified? And why didn’t
the other two members of the crew behave in the same way? Why didn’t
they go home? And—and so forth.”

Leaphorn had extracted a folded paper from his jacket pocket. He
opened it, glanced at it.

“That suicide note Jorie left,” he said. “It seems to sort of
explain some of that.”

Chee, who had promised himself never to be surprised by Leaphorn
again, was surprised. Had the
Legendary Lieutenant just walked off with the suicide note? Surely the
FBI wouldn’t have given Leaphorn a copy. Chee tried to imagine that and
failed. Legendary or not, Leaphorn was now a mere civilian. But the
paper Leaphorn was handing him was indeed a suicide note, and the name
on the bottom was Jorie’s.