Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 14] (17 page)

McKissack nodded and looked at the Polaroid camera Chee was
carrying. “They tell me those things are a lot better now,” he said. He
handed Chee a barf bag and a flight helmet, and explained how the
intercom system worked.

“You’ll be sitting on the right side behind DeMoss, which gives you
a great view to the right, but nothing much to the front or the left.
So if your mine is on the east side, your best chance to see it will be
when we’re going north, down the creek toward the river.”

“OK,” Chee said.

“We normally fly a hundred and fifty feet off the terrain, which
means our equipment is scoping a swath three hundred feet wide. Down a
canyon it may be lower, but we rarely get closer than fifty feet.
Anyway, if you see something interesting, holler. If the situation is
right, I can hover a minute so maybe you can get pictures.”

McKissack started the rotors. “One more thing,” he said, his voice
coming through the intercom now. “We’ve been shot at a few times out
here. Either people think we’re the black helicopters the Conspiracy
Commandos are taking over the world with, or maybe we’re scaring their
sheep. Who knows? Are we likely to get shot at in this canyon here?”

Chee considered that a moment and gave an honest answer. He said,
“Probably not,” and they took off in a chaos of dust, motor noise and
rotor thumping.

Later Chee had very few memories of that flight, but the ones he
retained were vivid.

The tableland of multicolored stone, carved into a gigantic
labyrinth by canyons, all draining eventually into the narrow green
belt of the San Juan bottom. Multiple hundreds of miles of sculptured
stone, cut off in the north by the blue-green of the mountains. The
slanting afternoon sun outlining it into a pattern of gaudy red
sandstone and deep shadows. The voice in Chee’s ear saying: ‘You can
see why the Mormons called the Bluff area “the Hole in the Rock,” and
the tech saying: 'If there was a market for rock, we’d all be rich.'

Then they dropped into the Gothic Creek Canyon, flying slowly north,
with the rimrock of Casa Del Eco Mesa above them and the great eroded
hump of the Nokaito Bench to their left. The pilot’s voice told Chee
they were about two miles up canyon from the point their censor map had
shown the streaks of migrated radiation along the canyon bottom.

“Be just a few minutes,” McKissack said. “Let me know if you see
anything interesting.”

Chee was leaning his head against the Plexiglas window, seeing the
stone cliffs slip slowly past. Here runoff erosion had sliced the
sandstone. Here a rockslide had formed a semi-dam below. Here some
variation of geology had caused a broad irregular bench to form. In
places, the wall was almost sheer pink sandstone. In others, it was
layered, marked with dark stripes of coal, the blue of shale, the red
where iron ore had colored the rock.

“It ought to be close,” McKissack said. “I think we can presume the
radiation from the old tailings was washing down stream.”

Gothic Creek Canyon had widened a little, and the copter was moving
down it slowly and almost eye level with the rimrock to Chee’s right.
Chee could see another bench sloping up from the canyon floor,
supporting a ragtag assortment of chamisa, snakeweed and
drought-stunted salt bush. It angled upward toward the broad blackish
streak of a coal seam. Then just a few yards ahead and just below Chee
saw what he was hoping to see.

“There’s a fair-sized hole in that coal deposit up ahead,” McKissack
said. “You think that could be what you’re looking for?”

“Could be,” Chee said. They slid past the hole, with Chee taking
pictures.

“Did you notice that structure above? Up on the mesa?” McKissack
asked.

“Could you go up a little so I can get a picture of it?”

The copter rose. Almost directly above the mouth of the mine was the
mostly roofless remains of a stone structure. Some of its walls had
fallen, and a pyramid-shaped skeleton of pine timbers rose from its
center.

“Well now,” said McKissack, "does that do it for you?”

“I’m finished, and I thank you,” Chee said.

“Unfortunately you’re not quite finished,” McKissack said. “We have
to drag this all the way down to the San Juan, and then back, and then
we go back over the mesa and finish our mapping there.”

“About how long?”

“About one hour and thirty-four minutes of flying four miles north,
making a sharp climbing turn, and flying four miles south, and making a
sharp climbing turn and flying four miles north. Doing that until we
have the quadrant covered. Then we land, get the tanks rejuiced and do
it all over again. Except this time it will be quitting time and we’ll
knock off for the day.”

The next voice was the technician’s. “And then we come back tomorrow
and do it all over again with another four-mile-by-four-mile quadrant.
Only time the monotony gets broken is when somebody shoots at us.”

Joe Leaphorn cleared away his breakfast dishes, poured himself his
second cup of coffee and spread his map on the kitchen table. He was
studying it when he heard tires rolling onto the gravel in the parking
space in front of his house. He pulled back the curtain and looked out
at a dark green and dusty Dodge Ram pickup. The truck was strange to
him, but the man who climbed out of it and was hurrying up his walk was
Roy Gershwin. Gershwin’s expression bespoke trouble.

Leaphorn opened the door, ushered him into the kitchen, and said,
“What brings you down to Window Rock so early this morning?”

“I got a telephone call last night,” Gershwin said. “A threatening
call. A man. Sounded like a fairly young man. He said they were going
to come after me.”

“Who? And come after you for what?”

Gershwin had slumped down in the kitchen chair with his long legs
stretched under the table. He looked nervous and angry. “I don’t know
who,” he said. “Well, maybe I could guess. His voice sounded familiar,
but I think he had something over his mouth. Or he was trying to talk
funny. If it was who I think it was, he’s one of those damn militia
people. Anyway, it was militia business. The fella said they’d heard
I’d been snitching on ‘em, and I was going to have to pay for that.”

“Well, now,” Leaphorn said, "it sounds like you were right to be
worrying about those people. Let me get you a cup of coffee.”

“I don’t want any coffee,” Gershwin said. “I want to know what you
did to get me screwed like this.”

“What I did?” Leaphorn diverted the coffeepot from the fresh cup and
refilled his own. “Well, let’s see. First, I just thought about what
you were asking me to do for you. I couldn’t think of any way to do it
without getting into a crack—having a choice of either telling a judge
you were my source or going to jail for contempt of a court order.”

He sat across the table from Gershwin and sipped his coffee. “You
sure you don’t want a cup?”

Gershwin shook his head.

“So then I went up and talked to people around Bluff and around
there about those men. I learned a little about all of them, but more
about Jorie,” Leaphorn said, watching Gershwin over the rim of his cup.
“I decided I’d see if any of them were home. Jorie was.”

“Killed himself. That right? So you’re the one who found his body.”

Leaphorn nodded.

“Paper said he left a suicide note. Is that right?”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “There it was.“ He wondered how he would
answer when Gershwin asked him what was in it. But Gershwin didn’t ask.

“I wonder why -" Gershwin began, but he cut off the sentence and
started again. “The newspaper story sort of said the note was a
confession. That he gave the names of the other two. That right?”

Leaphorn nodded.

“Then I don’t see why those militia bastards are putting the blame
on me." The tone of that was angry, and so was his stare.

“That’s a puzzle,” Leaphorn said. “Do you think they suspect you
know a lot about the robbery plan and were giving that away? Any chance
of that?”

“I don’t see how that could be. When I was going to meetings, there
was always somebody talking about doing something wild. Something to
call attention to their little revolution. But nobody ever talked about
robbery.”

Leaphorn let it drop. He took another sip of coffee, looked at
Gershwin, waited.

Gershwin slammed his fist on the table. “Damn it to hell,” he said.
“Why can’t the cops catch those bastards? They’re out there somewhere.
They got their names. Know what they look like. Know where they live.
Know their habits. It’s just like that ‘98 mess. You got FBI agents
swarming around everywhere. You Navajo cops, and the Border Patrol, and
four kinds of state cops, and county sheriffs, and twenty other kinds
of cops standing around and manning roadblocks. Why in hell can’t they
get the job done?”

“I don’t know,” Leaphorn said. “But there’s enough canyons out there
to swallow up ten thousand cops.”

“I guess so. I guess I’m being unreasonable." He shook his head. “To
be absolutely honest about it, I’m scared. I’ll admit it. That guy that
came to the filling station at Bluff the other morning, he could just
as easy have come to my house. I could be dead right now. Dead in my
bed. Just waiting for somebody to come wandering by and find my body.”

Leaphorn tried to think of something reassuring to say. The best he
could come up with was that he guessed the bandits would rather run
than fight. It didn’t seem to console Gershwin.

“You got any idea if the cops are closing in on them? Have they
figured out where they might be?”

Leaphorn shook his head.

“If I knew that, I could sleep a little better. Now I can’t sleep at
all. I just sit in my chair with the lights off and my rifle on my
lap." He gave Leaphorn a pleading look. “I’ll bet you know something.
Long as you was a cop, knowing all the other cops the way you do, and
the FBI, they must tell you something.”

“The last 1 heard is pretty much just common knowledge. That stolen
truck was abandoned out there on the mesa south of the San Juan, and
that’s where I understand they’re trying to pick up some tracks. South
of Bluff and Montezuma Creek and over in the Aneth Oil -"

The buzz of his telephone interrupted him.

He picked it up off the table, said, “Leaphorn.”

“This is Jim Chee. We found that mine." Chee’s voice was loud with
exuberance.

“Oh. Where?”

“You got your map there?”

“Just a minute.“ Leaphorn slid the map closer, picked up his pen.
“OK.”

“The mouth is not more than thirty feet below the canyon rim. About
a hundred, hundred and ten feet up from the canyon bottom on a fairly
wide shelf. And above it, there’s the remains of what must
have been a fairly large building. Most of the roof gone now, but a lot
of the stone walls still standing. And the framework of what might have
been some sort of a hoist sticking up.”

“Sounds like what you were hoping to find,” Leaphorn said.

“And the reason it fits the theory is you couldn’t see the mouth of
the mine from the bottom. It’s maybe seventy feet up, and hidden by the
shelf.”

“How’d you find it?”

Chee laughed. “The easy way. Hitched a ride in the EPA helicopter.”

Leaphorn still had the pen poised. “Where is it from the place they
abandoned the truck?”

“About two miles north—maybe a little less than that.”

Leaphorn marked one of his small, precise X’s at the proper spot. He
glanced at Gershwin.

“What’s all this about?” Gershwin asked.

Leaphorn made one of those ‘just a second’ gestures. “Have you
notified the FBI?”

“I’m going to call Captain Largo right now,” Chee said. “Let him
explain it to the federals.”

“That sounded interesting,” Gershwin said. “Did they find something
useful?”

Leaphorn hesitated. “Maybe. Maybe not. They’ve been looking for an
old, long-abandoned mine out there. One of a thousand places people
might hide.”

“An old coal mine,” Gershwin said. “There’s lots of those around.
You think it’s something I could count on? Sleep easy again?”

Leaphorn shrugged. “You mean, would I bet my life on it?”

“Yeah,” Gershwin said. “I guess that’s what I mean." He stood,
picked up his hat, looked down at the map. “Well, to hell with it. I
think I owe you an apology, Joe, storming in here like I did. I’m just
going to head on home, pack up my stuff, and move out to a motel until
this business is over with.”

Sergeant Jim Chee limped into Largo’s cluttered office feeling even
more uneasy than he usually did when approaching the captain. And
rightfully so. When he’d pulled into the Navajo Tribal Police parking
lot he’d noticed two of the shiny black Ford Taurus FBI sedans. Chee’s
law-enforcement rela-tionship with the world’s largest police force had
often been beset with friction. And Captain Largo’s telephone call
summoning him to this meeting had been even more terse than usual.

“Chee,” Largo had said, "get your ass up here. Now!" Chee nodded to
Special Agent Cabot and the other well-dressed fellow sitting across
the desk from the captain and took the chair to which Largo motioned
him. He put his cane across his lap and waited.

“You already know Agent Cabot,” Largo said. “And this gentleman is
Special Agent Smythe." Mutual mumbles and nods followed.

“I’ve been trying to explain to them why you think this old mine
you’ve found might be the place to look for Ironhand and Baker,” Largo
said. “They tell me they’ve already checked every mine deeper than a
dog hole up on that mesa. If you’ve found one they missed, they want to
know where it is.”

Chee told them, estimating as closely as he could the distance of
the mine’s canyon mouth from the San Juan and the distance of the
surface structure in from the canyon rim.

“You spotted this from a helicopter?” Cabot asked. “Is that correct?”