Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 14] (10 page)

“Yes,” Chee said. Nakai was telling him he had failed to meet
Nakai’s standards as a shaman whose conduct of the curing ways would
actually cure. And Nakai was forgiving him—freeing him to be the sort
of modern man he was becoming. There was a sense of relief in that,
mixed with a dreary sense of loss.

It was just a bit after noon when Captain Largo caught him.

Through his dreams Chee heard the sound of something thumping, which
gradually became pounding, which suddenly was augmented by an angry
shout.

“Damn it, Chee, I know you’re in there. Unlock the door.”

Chee unlocked the door and stood, naked except for boxer shorts and
befuddled by sleep, staring at the captain.

“Where the hell have you been?” Largo demanded, pushing past Chee
into the trailer. “And why don’t you answer your telephone?”

The captain was staring at the telephone as he said it, noticing the
little red light blinking on the answering machine.

“I’ve been away,” Chee said. “Just got back, and I had a lot of
family business to take care of.”

He reached over, punched the button, awake enough now to be glad
he’d been smart enough to erase the call from Cowboy Dashee. The
machine reproduced the grouchy voice of Captain Largo saying: ‘This is
Captain Largo. Get your ass down here. The feds located that damned
airplane, and we’re going to be the beagles on one of their fox hunts
again.'

The machine showed two other calls waiting and Chee clicked it off
before they, whatever they were, got him into any trouble.

“I should have listened to that,” he said. “But I just got in about
nine this morning, and I was worn-out." He told Largo how he and
Officer Manuelito had brought his mother’s oldest brother home from the
hospital, about how the old man had managed to hold death at bay until
he saw sunlight on the mountaintop, how Bernadette had gone to bring
Blue Woman’s sisters to help prepare the body for the traditional
funeral. Under his uniform Largo was a traditional, a Standing Rock
Dine’
.
He recalled the old man’s fame as a singer and his wisdom and, like
Chee himself, avoided speaking the name of the dead. He offered Chee
his condolences, sat on the edge of Chee’s fold-down cot, shook his
head.

“I’d give you some time off if I could,” he said, ignoring the fact
that Chee was officially still on vacation, "but you know how it is.
We’ve got everybody out looking for those bastards, so I’m just going
to give you a minute to get your uniform on, and while you do that I’ll
fill you in, and then I want you out there getting things a little
better organized.”

“OK,” Chee said.

A sudden and unpleasant thought struck the captain. “Manuelito was
with you, then,” Largo said, looking murderous. “She didn’t bother to
tell me, though. Did she bother to tell you I was looking all over for
you?”

“I didn’t ask her,” Chee said, and busied himself getting his pants
on, buttoning his shirt, hoping Largo wouldn’t notice how he’d evaded
the question, thinking of nothing to say to take the heat off Bernie,
and now, happy to see the captain heading out the door.

“I’ll bring you up to speed in my office,” Largo said. “In exactly
thirty minutes.”

Approximately thirty minutes later Chee was sitting in the chair in
front of Largo’s desk, listening to the captain’s end of a telephone
conversation. “OK,” the captain said. “Sure. I understand. Will do.
OK.” He hung up, sighed, looked at Chee and his watch. “All right,” he
said. “Here’s the situation.”

Largo was good at it. He named and described the surviving suspects.
Nobody was at home at either man’s residence. None of the neighbors had
seen either man since before the robbery, which meant absolutely
nothing in Ironhand’s case because the nearest neighbor lived about
four miles away. A horse trailer and two horses seemed to be missing
from Ironhand’s place. Since nobody could guess when or why, that might
be equally meaningless. With their airplane-escape theory shot down,
the feds had resumed custody of the manhunt operation, roadblocks were
up, and trackers were working over the area around the spot where the
suspects had abandoned the escape vehicle.

“Pretty much Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey again,” Largo
said. “Three sets of state police involved, three sheriff’s
departments, probably four, BIA cops, Ute cops, cops over from the
Jicarilla Reservation, Immigration and Naturalization is sending up its
Border Patrol trackers, federals galore, even Park Service security
people. I’m putting you in Montezuma Creek. We have four people up
there working with the FBI trying to locate some tracks. You’re
reporting to Special Agent"—Largo consulted a notepad on his
desk—"named Damon Cabot. I don’t know him.”

“I’ve heard of him,” Chee said. “You remember that old poem: 'The
Lodges spoke only to Cabots, and the Cabots spoke only to God.'”

“No, I don’t,” Largo said, "and I hope you’re not going up there
with that smart-aleck attitude.”

Chee looked at his watch. “You want me up there today?”

“I wanted you up there yesterday,” Largo said. “Be careful and keep
in touch.”

“OK,” Chee said, and headed for the door.

“And Chee,” Largo said. “Use your head for once. Don’t get crosswise
with the Bureau again. Have some manners. Give ’em some respect.”

Chee nodded.

Largo was grinning at him. “If you have trouble giving ‘em respect,
just remember they get paid about three times more than you do.”

“Yeah,” Chee said. "That’ll help.”

The gathering place for the manhunt was the conference room of the
Montezuma Creek Chapter House. The parking lot was crowded with a
varied assortment of police cars, most easily identified by
jurisdiction by Chee. He spotted Cowboy Dashee’s Apache County patrol
unit resting off the gravel but under the shade of the lot’s solitary
tree, a couple NTP units, two of the shiny black Ford sedans the FBI
used and an equally shiny green Land Rover. That, he concluded, would
be far too expensive to be owned by any of the nonfederal agencies
here. Probably it had been seized in a drug raid and driven down from
Salt Lake or Denver by whichever Special Agent had been put in charge
of this affair.

The conference room itself was as crowded as the lot and almost as
hot. Someone had concluded that the feeble window-mounted
air-conditioning unit wasn’t handling the body heat produced by the
crowd and had opened windows. A dozen or so men, some in camouflage
outfits, some in uniforms, some in suits, were crowded around a table.
Chee saw Dashee perched on a folding chair beside one of them, reading
something.

Chee walked over. “Hey there, fella,” he said to Dashee. “Are you
the Special Agent in Charge?”

“Keep your voice down,” Cowboy said. “I don’t want the feds to know
I associate with you. Not until this business is over, anyway. However,
the man you want to report to is that tall guy with the black baseball
cap with FBI on it. That doesn’t stand for Full Blood Indian.”

“He looks sort of young. Do you think he understands this country?”

Dashee laughed. “Well, he asked me about the trout fishing in the
San Juan. He said somebody told him it was great. I think he’s based in
St Louis.”

“You tell him fishing was good?”

“Come on, Chee. Ease up. I just told him it was great about two
hundred miles upstream before all the muddy irrigation water gets
dumped in. He seems like a good guy. Said he was new out here. Didn’t
know whether to call a gully an arroyo, or a wash, or a cut, or a
creek. His name’s Damon Cabot.”

Up close Damon Cabot looked even younger than he had from the back
of the room. He shook hands with Chee, explained that other detachments
were handling other aspects of the hunt and that this group was trying
to collect all possible evidence from the area where the escape vehicle
had been abandoned.

“Here’s where we have you,” he said, pointing to the map spread on
the table and indicating a red X near the center of Casa Del Eco Mesa.
“That’s our Truck Base. Where the perps abandoned the pickup truck. Are
you familiar with that area?”

“Just generally,” Chee said. “I worked mostly out of Shiprock and in
the Tuba City district. That’s way west of here.”

“Well, you know it a hell of a lot better than I do,” Cabot said. “I
just got reassigned from Philadelphia to Salt Lake City about a week
ago. Did you work in that 1998 manhunt?”

Chee nodded.

“From what I’ve been overhearing, the Bureau didn’t add any luster
to its reputation with that one.”

Chee shrugged. “Nobody did.”

“What do you think? Are those two guys still out there?”

“From 1998? Who knows? But a lot of people around here think so,”
Chee said.

“I guess the Bureau decided they’re dead,” Cabot said. “I just
wondered -" He cut that off, and shifted into telling Chee how the
fugitives were thought to be armed: assault rifles and perhaps at least
one scoped hunting rifle. Chee noticed that Special Agent Cabot seemed
slightly downcast. The man had been trying to be friendly. The
realization surprised Chee. It made him a bit ashamed of himself.

He brought that up with Cowboy as they drove in the deputy’s patrol
car to the meeting place on Casa Del Eco Mesa.

“Exactly what I’ve been telling you,” Cowboy said. “You pick on the
feds all the time. Hostile. I think it grows out of your basic and
well-justified inferiority complex. There’s a little envy mixed in
there, too, I think. Healthy, good-looking guys, blow-dry haircuts, big
salaries, good retirement, shiny shoes, Hollywood always making movies
about them, heel-e-o-copters to fly around in, flak jackets, expense
accounts, retirement pensions and"—Cowboy paused, gave Chee a sidewise
glance -"and getting to associate with those real pretty Justice
Department public-defender lawyers all the time.”

Which was Cowboy’s effort to open the subject of Janet Pete. Chee
had once asked Cowboy to be his best man if Janet insisted on the white
people’s style of wedding Janet’s mother wanted instead of the Navajo
wedding Chee preferred. He never really explained to Cowboy how that
affair had crashed and burned, and he wasn’t going to do it now.

“How about you, Cowboy?” Chee said. “Nobody ever accused you of
loving the federals. You’re the one who told me the most popular course
in the FBI Academy is Insufferable Arrogance 101.”

“It’s Arrogance 201 that’s popular. They expect recruits to test out
of 101. Anyhow, most of them are nice guys. Just a lot richer than us.”

One of them was awaiting them at Truck Base, sitting in a black van,
monitoring radio traffic with a book open on the seat beside him. He
said the Special Agent running this part of the show had gone down in
the canyon, and they were supposed to wait for instructions.

The radio tech pointed to the yellow police-line tape he’d parked
beside.

“Don’t go inside that,” he said. “That’s where the perps abandoned
their truck. We can’t have people messing that up until the crime-lab
team signs off on it.”

“OK,” Cowboy said. “We’ll just wait.”

They leaned against Cowboy’s patrol car.

“Why didn’t you tell him you were the one who put up the tape?” Chee
asked.

“Just being nice,” Cowboy said. “You ought to try that. The feds
respond well to kindness.”

Chee let that one pass into a long silence, which he broke with a
question.

“Have you heard how the Bureau got the perps identified? I know they
announced it to the press, which means they’re sure of ’em. So first I
thought they’d found the inside man and got him to talk. This Teddy Bai
guy they were holding at the hospital. Do you know if they got him to
talk?”

“All I know is fourth-hand,” Cowboy said. “I heard your old boss did
it. Got the names for them.”

“Old boss?”

“Joe Leaphorn,” Dashee said. “The Legendary Lieutenant Leaphorn. Who
else?”

“Be damned,” Chee said. “How the devil could that have happened?”
But he noticed that he wasn’t really surprised.

“They said the sheriff got a call from some old friend from Aneth,
or someplace like that—a former county cop named Potts. This Potts said
Leaphorn came to his house and asked him about three men and then how
to find this Jorie guy’s place. Hour or so later Leaphorn calls the
cops from Jorie’s house and tells them Jorie’s killed himself. That’s
all I know.”

“Be damned,” Chee said again. “How in hell does -"

“How long did you work for him?” Cowboy asked. “Three, four
years?” 

“Seemed longer,” Chee said.

“So you know he’s smart,” Cowboy said. “Logical, thinks things out.”

“Yeah,” Chee said, sounding grumpy. “Everything fits into a pattern
for him. Every effect has its cause. I told you about his map, didn’t
I? Full of different colored pins marking different sort of things.
He’d stick ’em in there marking off travel times, confluences, so
forth. Looking for a pattern.”

Chee paused, struck by a sudden thought. “Or lack of one,” he added.

Cowboy looked at him. “Like what do you mean?”

“Like I just thought of something that doesn’t fit here. Remember,
you told me this truck abandoned here was an oversized cab job, right?
And you found two sets of footprints around it. And three was the
number of guys seen in the robbery.”

“Right,” Cowboy said. “So where’s that leading?”

“So how did this Jorie get from here to his home up in Utah?”

Silence while Cowboy considered that. He sighed. “I don’t know. How
about they dropped him off at his house before they got here. Or how
about he actually got out of the truck here, but he was very careful
where he stepped.”

“You think that’s possible?”

“No. Not really. I’m pretty good at finding tracks.”

The door of the communications van opened, and the tech leaned out.