Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 14]

ALSO BY TONY HILLERMAN

The First Eagle

The Fallen Man

Finding Moon

Sacred Clowns

Coyote Waits

Talking God

A Thief of Time

Skinwalkers

The Dark Wind

People of Darknesss

Listening Women

Dance Hall of the Dead

The Fly on the Wall

The Blessing Way

HarperCollinsPublishers

85 Fulham Palace Road

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.fireandwater.com

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2000
1. 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Copyright © Tony Hillerman

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of
this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library

ISBN 0 00 226199 5

Set in Linotype Postscript Goudy

Typeset by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd,

Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Omnia Books Limited, Glasgow

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publishers.

On May 4, 1998, Officer Dale Claxton of the Cortez, Colorado, police
stopped a stolen water truck. Three men in it killed him with a
fusillade of automatic weapons fire. In the chase ensuing, three other
officers were wounded, one of the suspects killed himself, and the two
survivors vanished into the vast, empty wilderness of mountains, mesas,
and canyons on the Utah-Arizona border. The Federal Bureau of
Investigation took over the manhunt. Soon it involved over five hundred
officers from at least twenty federal, state, and tribal agencies, and
bounty hunters attracted by a $250,000 FBI reward offer.

To quote Leonard Butler, the astute Chief of Navajo Tribal Police,
the search “became a circus.” Sighting reports sent to the coordinator
were not reaching search teams. Search parties found themselves
tracking one another, unable to communicate on mismatched radio
frequencies, local police who knew the country sat at roadblocks while
teams brought in from the cities were floundering in canyons strange to
them. The town of Bluff was evacuated, a brush fire was set in the San
Juan bottoms to smoke out the fugitives, and the hunt dragged on into
the summer. The word spread in July that the FBI believed the fugitives
dead (possibly of laughter, one of my cop friends said). By August,
only the Navajo Police still had scouts out looking for signs.

As I write this (July 1999) the fugitives remain free. But the hunt
of 1998 exists in this book only as the fictional memory of fictional
characters.

—TONY HILLERMAN

The characters in this book are fictional with the exception of
Patti (P.J.) Collins and the Environmental Protection Agency survey
team. My thanks to Ms Collins for providing information about this
radiation-mapping job, and to P.J. and the copter crew for giving Chee
a ride up Gothic Canyon.

Deputy Sheriff Teddy Bai had been leaning on the doorframe looking
out at the night about three minutes or so before he became aware that
Cap Stoner was watching him.

“Just getting some air,” Bai said. “Too damn much cigarette smoke in
there.”

“You’re edgy tonight,” Cap said, moving up to stand in the doorway
beside him. “You young single fellas ain’t supposed to have anything
worrying you.”

“I don’t,” Teddy said.

“Except maybe staying single,” Cap said. “There’s that.”

“Not with me,” Teddy said, and looked at Cap to see if he could read
anything in the old man’s expression. But Cap was looking out into the
Ute Casino’s parking lot, showing only the left side of his face, with
its brush of white mustache, short-cropped white hair and the puckered
scar left along the cheekbone when, as Cap told it, a woman he was
arresting for Driving While Intoxicated fished a pistol out of her
purse and shot him. That had been about forty years ago, when Stoner
had been with the New Mexico State Police only a couple of years and
had not yet learned that survival required skepticism about all his
fellow humans. Now Stoner was a former captain, augmenting his
retirement pay as a rent-a-cop security director at the Southern Ute
gambling establishment—just as Teddy was doing on his off-duty nights.

“What’d ya tell that noisy drunk at the blackjack table?”

“Just the usual,” Teddy said. “Calm down or he’d have to leave.”

Cap didn’t comment. He stared out into the night. “Saw some
lightning,” he said, pointing. “Just barely. Must be way out there over
Utah. Time for it, too.”

“Yeah,” Teddy said, wanting Cap to go away.

“Time for the monsoons to start,” Cap said. “The thirteenth, isn’t
it? I’m surprised so many people are out here trying their luck on
Friday the thirteenth.”

Teddy nodded, providing no fodder to extend this conversation. But
Cap didn’t need any.

“But then it’s payday. They got to get rid of all that money in
their pay envelopes.“ Cap looked at his watch. “Three-thirty-three,” he
announced.

“Almost time for the truck to get here to haul off the loot to the
bank.”

And, Teddy thought, a few minutes past the time when a little blue
Ford Escort was supposed to have arrived in the west lot. “Well,” he
said, “I’ll go prowl around the parking areas. Scare off the thieves.”

Teddy found neither thieves nor a little blue Escort in the west
lot. When he looked back at the EMPLOYEES ONLY doorway, Cap was no
longer there. A few minutes late. A thousand reasons that could happen.
No big deal. He enjoyed the clean air, the predawn high-country chill,
the occasional lightning over the mountains. He walked out of the
lighted area to check his memory of the midsummer starscape. Most of
the constellations were where he remembered they should be. He could
recall their American names, and some of the names his Navajo
grandmother had taught him, but only two of the names he’d wheedled out
of his Kiowa-Comanche father. Now was that moment his grandmother
called the ‘deep dark time,” but the late-rising moon was causing a
faint glow outlining the shape of Sleeping Ute Mountain. He heard the
sound of laughter from somewhere. A car door slammed. Then another. Two
vehicles pulled out of the east lot, heading for the exit. Coyotes
began a conversation of yips and yodels among the pinons in the hills
behind the casino. The sound of a truck gearing down came from the
highway below. A pickup pulled into the EMPLOYEES ONLY lot, parked,
produced the clattering sound of something being unloaded.

Teddy pushed the illumination button on his Timex. Three-forty-six.
Now the little blue car was late enough to make him wonder a little. A
man wearing what looked like coveralls emerged into the light carrying
an extension ladder. He placed it against the casino wall, trotted up
it to the roof.

“Now what’s that about?” Teddy said, half-aloud. Probably an
electrician. Probably something wrong with the air-conditioning. “Hey,”
he shouted, and started toward the ladder. Another pickup pulled into
the employee lot—this one a big oversize-cab job. Doors opened. Two men
emerged. National Guard soldiers apparently, dressed in their fatigues.
Carrying what? They were walking fast toward the EMPLOYEES ONLY door.
But that door had no outside knob. It was the accounting room, opened
only from the inside and only by guys as important as Cap Stoner.

Stoner was coming out of the side entrance now. He pointed at the
roof, shouted, “Who’s that up there? What the hell—”

“Hey,” Teddy yelled, trotting toward the two men, unsnapping the
flap on his holster. “What’s —”

Both men stopped. Teddy saw muzzle flashes, saw Cap Stoner fall
backward, sprawled on the pavement. The men spun toward him, swinging
their weapons. He was fumbling with his pistol when the first bullets
struck him.

Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police was feeling downright
fine. He was just back from a seventeen-day vacation. He was happily
reassigned from an acting-lieutenant assignment in Tuba City to his old
Shiprock home territory, and he had five days of vacation left before
reporting back to work. The leftover mutton stew extracted from his
little refrigerator was bubbling pleasantly on the propane burner. The
coffeepot steamed—producing an aroma as delicious as the stew. Best of
all, when he did report for work there wouldn’t be a single piece of
paperwork awaiting his attention.

Now, as he filled his bowl and poured his coffee, what he was
hearing on the early news made him feel even better. His fear—his
downright dread that he’d soon be involved in another FBI-directed
backcountry manhunt was being erased. The TV announcer was speaking
‘live’ from the Federal Courthouse, reporting that the bad guys who had
robbed the casino on the Southern Ute Reservation about the time Chee
was leaving Fairbanks, were now ‘probably several hundred miles away.'

In other words, safely out of Shiprock’s Four Corners territory and
too far away to be his problem.

The theory of the crime the FBI had hung on this robbery, as the
handsome young TV employee was now reporting on the seventeen-inch
screen in Chee’s trailer, went like this: ‘Sources involved in the hunt
said the three bandits had stolen a small single-engine aircraft from a
ranch south of Montezuma Creek, Utah. Efforts to trace the plane are
under way, and the FBI asked anyone who might have seen the plane
yesterday or this morning to call the FBI.'

Chee sampled the stew, sipped coffee and listened to the announcer
describe the plane—an elderly dark blue single-engine high-wing
monoplane—a type used by the U.S. Army for scouting and artillery
spotting in Korea and the early years of the Vietnam War. The sources
quoted suggested the robbers had taken the aircraft from the rancher’s
hangar and used it to flee the area.

That sounded good to Chee. The farther the better. Canada would be
fine, or Mexico. Anywhere but the Four Corners. In the spring of 1998
he’d been involved in an exhausting, frustrating FBI
directed manhunt for two cop killers. At its chaotic worst, officers
from more than twenty federal, state, county and reservation agencies
had floundered around for weeks in that one with no arrests made before
the federals decided to call it off by declaring the suspects ‘probably
dead.' It wasn’t an experience Chee wanted to repeat.

The little hatch Chee had cut into the bottom of the trailer door
clattered behind him on its rubber hinges, which meant his cat was
making an unusually early visit. That told Chee that a coyote was close
enough to make Cat nervous or a visitor was coming. Chee listened. Over
the sound of the television, now selling a cell-telephone service, he
heard wheels on the dirt track that connected his home under the San
Juan River cottonwoods to the Shiprock-Cortez highway above.

Who would it be? Maybe Cowboy Dashee, but this wasn’t Cowboy’s usual
day off from his deputy sheriff’s job. Chee swallowed another bite of
stew, went to the door and pulled back the curtain. A fairly new Ford
150 pickup rolled to a stop under the nearest tree. Officer Bernadette
Manuelito was sitting in it, staring straight ahead. Waiting, Navajo
fashion, for him to recognize her arrival.

Chee sighed. He was not ready for Bernie. Bernie represented
something he’d have to deal with sooner or later, but he preferred
later. The gossip in the small world of cops had it that Bernie had a
crush on him. Probably true, but not something he wanted to think about
now. He’d wanted some time. Time to adjust to the joy of being demoted
from acting lieutenant back to sergeant. Time to get over the numbness
of knowing he’d finally burned the bridge that had on its other end
Janet Pete -seductive, smart, chic, sweet and treacherous. He wasn’t
ready for another problem. But he opened the door.

Officer Manuelito seemed to be off-duty. She climbed out of her
truck wearing jeans, boots, a red shirt and a Cleveland Indians
baseball cap and looking small, pretty and slightly untidy, just as he
remembered her. But somber. Even her smile had a sad edge to it.
Instead of the joke he had ready for her, Chee simply invited her in,
gesturing to his chair beside the table. He sat on the edge of his cot
and waited.

“Welcome back to Shiprock,” Bernie said.

“Happy to escape from Tuba,” Chee said. “How’s your mother?”

“About the same,” Bernie said. Last winter, her mother’s drift into
the dark mists of Alzheimer’s disease won Officer Manuelito a transfer
back to Shiprock, where she could better care for her. Chee’s was a
late-summer transfer, caused by his reversion from acting lieutenant to
sergeant. The Tuba City section didn’t need another sergeant. Shiprock
did.

“Terrible disease,” Chee said.

Bernie nodded. Glanced at him. Looked away.

“I heard you went up to Alaska,” Bernie said. “How was it?”

“Impressive. Took the cruise up the coast.“ He waited. Bernie hadn’t
made this call to hear about his vacation.

“I don’t know how to do this,” she said, giving him a sidelong
glance.

“Do what?” Chee asked.

“You don’t have anything to do with that casino thing, do you?”

Chee felt trouble coming. “No,” he said.

“Anyway, I need some advice.”

“I’d say just turn yourself in. Return the money. Make a full
confession and…"

Chee stopped there, wishing he’d kept his mouth shut. Bernie was
looking at him now, and her expression said this was not the time for
half-baked humor.

“Do you know Teddy Bai?”

“Bai? Is that the rent-a-cop wounded in the casino robbery?”

“Teddy’s a Montezuma County deputy sheriff,” Bernie said, rather
stiffly. “That was just a part-time temporary job with casino security.
He was just trying to make some extra money.”

“I wasn’t -" Chee began and stopped. Less said the better until he
knew what this was all about. So he said, “I don’t know him.” And
waited.

“He’s in the hospital at Farmington,” Bernie said. “In intensive
care. Shot three times. Once through a lung. Once through the stomach.
Once through the right shoulder.”

Clearly Bernie knew Bai pretty well. All he knew about this case
personally was what he’d read in the papers, and he hadn’t seen any of
these details reported. He said, “Well, that San Juan Medical Center
there has a good reputation. I’d think he’d be getting -"

“They think he was involved in the robbery,” Bernie said. “I mean
the FBI thinks so. They have a guard outside his room.”

Chee said, “Oh?” And waited again. If Bernie knew why they thought
that, she’d tell him. What he’d read, and what he’d heard, was that the
bandits had killed the casino security boss and critically wounded a
guard. Then, during their escape, they’d shot at a Utah Highway
Patrolman who had flagged them for speeding.

Bernie looked close to tears. “It doesn’t make any sense,” she said.

“It doesn’t seem to. Why would they want to shoot their own man?”

“They think Teddy was the inside man,” Bernie said. “They think the
robbers shot him because he knew who they were, and they didn’t trust
him.”

Chee nodded. He didn’t have to ask Bernie how she knew all this
confidential stuff. Even if it wasn’t her case, she was a cop, and if
she really wanted to know, she’d know who to talk to. “Sounds pretty
weak to me,” he said. “Cap Stoner was shot, too. He was the security
boss out there. You’d think they’d figure Stoner for the inside man.”

He rose, poured a cup of coffee, and handed it to Bernie, giving her
a little time to think how she wanted to answer that.

“Everybody liked Stoner,” she said. “All the old-timers anyway. And
Teddy’s been in trouble before,” she said. “When he was just a kid. He
got arrested for joyriding in somebody else’s truck.”

“Well it couldn’t have been very serious,” Chee said. “At least the
county was willing to hire him as a deputy.”

“It was a juvenile thing,” Bernie said.

“Awful weak then. Do they have something else on him?”

“Not really,” she said.

He waited. Bernie’s expression told him something worse was coming.
Or maybe not. Maybe she wouldn’t tell him.

She sighed. “People at the casino said he’d been acting strange.
They said he was nervous. Instead of watching people inside, he kept
going out into the parking lot. When his shift was over, he stayed
around. He told one of the cleanup crew he was waiting to be picked up.”

“OK,” Chee said. “I can see it now. I mean them thinking he was
waiting for the gang to show up. In case they needed help.”

“He wasn’t, though. He was waiting for someone else.”

“No problem, then. When he gets well enough to talk, he tells the
feds who he was waiting for. They check, confirm it, and there’s no
reason to hold him,” Chee said, thinking there was probably something
else.

“I don’t think he’ll tell,” Bernie said.

“Oh. You mean he was waiting for a woman then?” He didn’t pursue
that. Didn’t ask her how she knew all this, or why she hadn’t passed it
along to the FBI. Didn’t ask her why she had come here to tell him
about it.

“I don’t know what to do,” Bernie said.

“Probably nothing,” he said. “If you do, they’ll want to know how
you got this information. Then they’ll talk to his wife. Mess up his
marriage.”

“He’s not married.”

Chee nodded, thinking there could be all sorts of reasons a guy
wouldn’t want the world to know about a woman picking him up at 4 A.M.
He just couldn’t think of a good one right away.

“They’ll be trying to get him to tell who the robbers were,” Bernie
said. “They’ll come up with some way to hold him until he tells. And he
won’t know who they are. So I’m afraid they’ll find something to charge
him with so they can hold him.”

“I just got back from Alaska,” Chee said, ”so I don’t know anything
about any of this. But I’ll bet they got a good idea by now who they’re
looking for.”

Bernie shook her head. “No. I don’t think so,” she said. “I hear
that’s a total blank. They were talking at first like it was some of
the right-wingers in one of the militia groups. Something political.
But now I hear they don’t have a clue.”

Chee nodded. That would explain why the FBI had been so quick to
announce the aircraft business. It took the heat off the area Agent in
Charge.

“You’re sure you know Bai was waiting for a woman? Do you know who?”

Bernie hesitated. “Yes.”

“Could you tell the feds?”

“I guess I could. I will if I have to.“ She put the coffee cup on
the table, untasted. “You know what I was thinking? I was thinking you
worked here a long time before they shifted you to Tuba City. You know
a lot of people. With the FBI thinking they already have the inside man
they won’t be looking for the real inside man. I thought maybe you
could find out who really was their helper in the casino. If anybody
can.”

Now it was Chee’s turn to hesitate. He sipped his coffee, cold now,
and tried to sort out his mixture of reactions to all this. Bernie’s
confidence in him was flattering, if misguided. Why did the thought
that Bernie was having an affair with this rent-a-cop disappoint him?
It should be a relief. Instead it gave him an empty, abandoned feeling.

“I’ll ask around,” Chee said.