Hunting Badger

Hunting Badger

Tony Hillerman

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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.

For Officer Dale Claxton

Who died doing his duty, bravely and alone

AUTHOR'S NOTE

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.

Chapter One

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.

Chapter Two

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.

Chapter Three

The only client in the dining room in Window Rock’s Navajo Inn was sitting at a table in the corner with a glass of milk in front of him. He was wearing a droopy gray-felt Stetson and reading the Gallup Independent. Joe Leaphorn stood at the entrance a moment studying him. Roy Gershwin, looking a lot older, more weather-beaten and wornout than he’d remembered him. But then he hadn’t seen him for years—not since Gershwin had helped him nail a U.S. Forest Service ranger who’d been augmenting his income by digging artifacts out of Anasazi burials on a Gershwin grazing lease. That had been at least six years ago, about the time Leaphorn had starting thinking about retirement. But they went far back beyond that—back to Leaphorn’s rookie years. Back to a summer when Leaphorn had arrested one of Gershwin’s hired hands on a rape complaint — a bad start with a happy ending. That had been the first time he’d heard Gershwin’s deep, gruff whiskey-ruined voice -an angry voice telling Leaphorn he’d arrested an innocent man. When he had answered the telephone this morning, he recognized that odd voice instantly.

“Lieutenant Leaphorn,” Gershwin had said. “I hear you’re retired now. Is that right? If it is, I guess I’m trying to impose on you.”

“Mr Gershwin,” Leaphorn had replied. “It’s Mr Leaphorn now, and it’s good to hear from you.“ He had heard himself saying that with a sort of surprise. This was what retirement was doing to him. And what lay ahead. This old rancher had never really been a friend. Just one of those thousands of people you deal with in a lifetime spent as a cop. But here he was, genuinely happy to hear his telephone ring. Happy to have someone to talk to.

But Gershwin had stopped talking. Long silence. The sound of the man clearing his throat. Then: "I guess this ain’t going to surprise you much. I mean to tell you I got myself a problem. I guess you’ve heard that from a lot of people. Being a policeman.”

“Sort of goes with the job,” Leaphorn said. Two years ago he would have grumbled about this sort of call. Today he wasn’t. Loneliness conditions.

“Well,” Gershwin said, "I got something I don’t know how to handle. I’d like to talk to you about it.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“I’m afraid it’s not something you can handle over the telephone,” Gershwin replied.

So they arranged to meet at three at the Navajo Inn. It was now three minutes short of that. Gershwin looked up, noticed Leaphorn approaching, stood and motioned him to the chair across from him.

“Damn good of you to come,” he said. “I was afraid you’d tell me you were retired now and I should worry somebody else with it.”

“Glad to help if I can,” Leaphorn said. They polished off the required social formalities faster than usual, discussing the cold, dry winter, poor grazing, risk of forest fires, agreed that last night’s weather report sounded like the monsoon season was about to start and finally got to the point.

“And what brings you all the way down here to Window Rock?”

“I heard on the radio yesterday the FBI’s got that Ute Casino robbery all screwed up. You know about that?”

“I’m out of the loop on crimes these days. Don’t know anything about it. But it wouldn’t be the first time an investigation went sour.”

“The radio said they’re looking for a damned airplane,” Gershwin said. “None of them fellas could fly anything more complicated than a kite.”

Leaphorn raised his eyebrows. This was getting interesting. The last he’d heard, those working the case had absolutely no identifications. But Gershwin had come here to tell him something. He’d let Gershwin talk.

“You want something to drink?” Gershwin waved at the waiter. “Too bad you fellows still have prohibition. Maybe one of those pseudo beers?”

“Coffee’d be good.”

The waiter brought it. Leaphorn sipped. Gershwin sampled his milk.

“I knew Cap Stoner,” Gershwin said. “They oughta not let them get away with killing him. It’s dangerous to have people like that around loose.”

Gershwin waited for a response.

Leaphorn nodded.

“Specially the two younger ones. They’re half-crazy.”

“Sounds like you know them.”

“Pretty well"

“You tell the FBI?”

Gershwin studied his milk glass again and found it about half-empty. Swirled it. He had a long, narrow face that betrayed his seventy or so years of dry air, windblown sand and dazzling sun, with a mass of wrinkles and sunburn damage. He shifted his bright blue eyes from the milk to Leaphorn.

“There’s a problem with that,” he said. “I tell the FBI, and sooner or later everybody knows it. Usually sooner. They come up there to see me at the ranch, or they call me. I’ve got a radio-telephone setup, and you know how that is. Everybody’s listening. Worse than the old party line.”

Leaphorn nodded. The nearest community to the Gershwin ranch would be Montezuma Creek, or maybe Bluff if his memory served. Not a place where visits from well-dressed FBI agents would go unnoticed, or untalked about.

“You remember that deal in the spring of ’98? The feds decided to announce those guys they were looking for are dead. But the folks who snitched on ‘em, or helped the cops, they’re damn sure keeping their doors locked and their guns loaded and their watchdogs out.”

“Didn’t the FBI say the gang in 1998 were survivalists? Is it the same people this time?”

Gershwin laughed. “Not if the feds had the names right the last time.”

“I’ll skip ahead a little,” Leaphorn said, "and you tell me if I have it figured right. You want the FBI to catch these guys, but in case they don’t, you don’t want folks to know you turned them in. So you’re going to ask me to pass along the -"

“Whether or not they catch them,” Gershwin said. “They have lots of friends.”

“The FBI said the 1998 bandits were part of a survivalist organization. Is that what you’re saying about these guys?”

“I think they call themselves the Rights Militia. They’re for saving the Bill of Rights. Making the Forest Service, and the BLM, and the Park Service people behave so folks can make a living out here.”

“You want to give me these names, and I pass them along to the feds. What do I say when the feds ask where I got them?”

Gershwin was grinning at him. “You got it partly wrong,” he said. “I’ve got the names on a piece of paper. I’m going to ask you to give me your word of honor that you’ll keep me out of it. If you won’t, then I keep the paper. If you promise, and we shake hands on it, then I’ll leave the names on the table here and you can pick it up if you want to.”

“You think you can trust me?”

“No doubt about it,” Gershwin said. “I did before. Remember? And I know some other people who trusted you.”

“Why do you want these people caught? Is it just revenge for Cap Stoner?”

“That’s part of it,” Gershwin said. “But these guys are scary. Some of them anyway. I used to have a little hand in this political stuff with the ones who started it. But then they got too wild.”

Gershwin had been about to finish his milk. Now he put the glass down. “Bastards in the Forest Service were acting like they personally owned the mountains,” he said. “We lived there all our lives, but now we couldn’t graze. Couldn’t cut wood. Couldn’t hunt elk. And the Land Management bureaucrats were worse. We were the serfs, and they were the lords. We just wanted to have some sort of voice with Congress. Get somebody to remind the bureaucrats who was paying their salaries. Then the crazies moved in. EarthFirst bunch wanting to blow up the bridges the loggers were using. That sort of thing. Then we got some New Age types, and survivalists and Stop World Government people. I sort of phased out.”

“So some of these guys did the casino job? Was it political?”

“What I hear, it was supposed to be to finance the cause. But I think some of them needed money to eat,” Gershwin said. “If you’re not working, I guess you could call that political. But maybe they did want to buy guns and ammunition and explosives. That sort of stuff. Anyway, that’s what folks I know in the outfit say. Needed cash to arm themselves to fight off the federal government.”

“I wonder how much they got,” Leaphorn said.

Gershwin drained his milk. Got up and extracted a folded sheet of paper from his shirt pocket.

“Here it is, Joe. Am I safe to leave it with you? Can you promise you won’t turn me in?”

Leaphorn had already thought that through. He could report this conversation to the FBI. They would question Gershwin. He’d deny everything. Nothing accomplished.

“Leave it,” Leaphorn said.

Gershwin dropped it on the table, put a dollar beside his milk glass and walked out past the waiter arriving to refill Leaphorn’s cup.

Leaphorn took a drink. He picked up the paper and unfolded it. Three names, each followed by a brief description. The first two, Buddy Baker and George Ironhand, meant nothing to him. He stared at the last one. Everett Jorie. That rang a faint and distant bell.

Chapter Four

Captain Largo looked up from the paper he’d been reading, peered over his glasses at Sergeant Chee, and said, “You’re a few days early, aren’t you? Your calendar break?”

“Captain, you forgot to say, 'Welcome Home. Glad to have you back. Have a seat. Be comfortable.' "

Largo grinned, waved at a chair across from his desk. “I’m almost afraid to ask it, but what makes you so anxious to get back to work?”

Chee sat. “I thought I’d get back to speed gradually. Find out what I’ve been missing. How’d you get so lucky not to get us dragged into another big manhunt as bush beaters for the federals?”

“That was a relief, that airplane business,” Largo said. “On the other hand, you hate to see people shooting policemen and getting away with it. Sets another bad example after that summer of ‘98 fiasco. You want some coffee? Go get yourself a cup, and we’ll talk. I want to hear about Alaska after you tell me what you’re doing here.”

Chee returned with his coffee. He sipped, sat, waited. Largo outwaited him.

“OK,” Chee said. “Tell me about the casino robbery. All I know is what I’ve seen in the papers.”

Largo leaned back in his chair, folded his arms across his generous stomach. “Just before four last Saturday morning a pickup drives into the casino lot. Guy gets out, takes out a ladder, climbs up on the roof and cuts the power lines, telephone lines, everything. Another pickup pulls in while this is going on and two guys get out wearing camouflage suits. A Montezuma County deputy, guy named Bai, is standing out there. Then Cap Stoner comes running out, and they shoot both of ‘em. You remember Stoner? He used to be a captain with the New Mexico State Police. Worked out of Gallup. Decent man. Then these two guys get into the cashier’s room. The money’s all sacked up to be handed to the Brinks truck. They make everybody lie down, walk out with the money bags and drive off. Apparently they drove west into Utah because about daylight a Utah Highway Patrolman tries to stop a speeding truck on Route 262 west of Aneth, and they shoot holes in his radiator. Pretty high-powered ammunition according to what Utah tells us.”

Largo paused, pushed his bulky frame out of his swivel chair with a grunt. “Need some of my coffee, myself,” he said, and headed for the dispenser in the front office.

Sort of good to be back working under Largo, Chee was thinking. Largo had been his boss in his rookie year. Cranky, but he knew his business. Then Largo was coming through the door, holding his cup, talking.

“With the lines out, and all the scared gamblers scrambling around trying to get away from the casino, or trying to grab some chips, or whatever you do when the lights go out at the craps table. Anyway, it took a while before anybody knew what the hell was going on and got the word out.“ Largo eased back into his chair. “I think just about every track you can drive on was blocked by sunup, but by then they had a hell of a lead. Next thing, maybe nine-thirty or so, the word went out somebody in a pickup had shot at the Utah trooper. That shifted the focus westward. The next day a couple of deputy sheriffs found a banged-up pickup abandoned up by the Arizona-Utah border south of Bluff. It fit the description.”

“They find any tracks? Were they walking out, changing cars or what?”

“Two sets of tracks around the truck, but here came the feds in their 'copters"—Largo paused, waved his arms in imitation of a helicopter’s rotors—"and blew everything away.”

“Slow learners,” Chee said. “That’s the same way they fanned away the tracks we’d found across the San Juan in that big thing in ’98.”

“Maybe we ought to get the Federal Aviation Administration to order all those things grounded during manhunts,” Largo said.

"They have anything to match them with? Did they find any tracks at the casino?”

Largo shook his head, paused to sip his coffee, shrugged. “It looked like we were going to have an encore performance of that 1998 business. The federals got a command post set up. Everybody was getting into the act. Regular circus. All we needed was the performing elephants. Had plenty of clowns.”

Chee grinned.

“You’d have loved to come home to that.”

“I’d have gone right back to Alaska,” Chee said. “How’d the FBI find out about the airplane?”

“The owner called in to report it stolen. He said he’d been away up in Denver. When he got home he noticed somebody had broken into his barn, and the airplane he kept there was gone.”

“Close to where the pickup was abandoned?”

“Mile and a half or so,” Largo said. “Maybe two.”

Chee considered that. Largo watched him.

“You’re thinking they must have liked to walk.”

“Well, there’s that,” Chee said. “But maybe they wanted to hide the truck. Or if it was found, keep it far enough from the barn so there wouldn’t be a connection.”

“Uh-huh,” Largo said, and sipped coffee. “The FBI says the truck was disabled.”

“Out there, it’s easy enough to blow tires or bust an oil pan on the rocks if you want to,” Chee said.

Largo nodded. “I remember back at Tuba City you did that to a couple of our units, and you claimed you weren’t even trying.”

Chee let that pass. “Anyway,” he said, “I just hope that airplane had enough gas in it to get ‘em out of our jurisdiction.”

“Full tank, the owner said."

“Makes you think, doesn’t it?” Chee said. “I mean how neat everything worked out on both ends of this business.”

Largo nodded. “If this was my responsibility now, I’d be getting that rancher’s fingerprints and checking out his record and seeing if he was maybe tied up with survivalists, or the Earth Liberation Front, or the tree-huggers, or one of the militia.”

“I imagine the FBI is taking care of that. That’s the part they’re good at,” Chee said. “And how about the casino end? What do you hear about that?”

“They think the rent-a-cop was part of the team. Filled ’em in on when the money was sacked up for the Brinks pickup. Which wires to cut, which security people had the evening off. All that.”

“Any evidence?”

Largo shrugged. “Nothing much I know about. This Teddy Bai they’re holding in the hospital, he had a juvenile record. Witnesses said he was acting skittish all evening. Waiting around out in the lot when he was supposed to be in watching the drunks.”

“That’s not much,” Chee said.

“They probably have more than that,” Largo said. “You know how they are. The feds don’t tell us locals anything unless they have to. They think we might gossip about it and screw up the investigation.”

Chee laughed. “What! Us gossip?”

Largo was grinning, too.

“Have they connected Bai with any of the suspects?”

Largo laughed. “That cold air up in Alaska made an optimist out of you. Not a hint far as I hear. There was some guessing that one of the militia did it to get money for blowing something up, or maybe it was the Earth Liberation Front, but I haven’t heard Bai was in any of them. The Earth Liberation folks have been pretty quiet since they burned up all those buildings at the Vail ski resort. Anyway, if anything checked out, they haven’t gotten around to informing the Navajo Tribal Police.”

“What do you think, Captain? Has your own grapevine been sending any messages about Bai that you haven’t gotten around to telling the feds about?”

Largo studied Chee, his expression suggesting he didn’t like the tone of that, and he wasn’t sure he would answer it. But he did.

“If Deputy Sheriff Bai is on the wrong side of this one, I haven’t heard it,” he said.

Chapter Five

Officer Bernadette Manuelito was absolutely correct when she reminded Chee that he knew a lot of people around Shiprock. That had paid off. A chat with a senior San Juan County undersheriff, a drop-in talk with an old friend in the county clerk’s office at Aztec, a visit at the Farmington pool hall and another at the Oilmen’s Bar and Grill had provided him with a headful of information about the Ute Casino in general and Teddy Bai in particular.

The casino came off better than he’d expected. There was the usual and automatic assumption that organized crime must have a finger in it somehow, but no one could offer any support for that. Otherwise, the people most likely actually to know anything considered it well run. No one had any specific notion about who might have been the robbery’s inside man if Bai wasn’t. There was agreement that Bai had been a wild kid and mixed opinion on his character in later life, with the consensus in favor of salvation. He had married a girl in the Streams Come Together Clan, but that hadn’t lasted. One of the regulars at Oilmen’s said since the divorce, Bai came in now and then with a young woman. Who? Chee asked. He didn’t know her, but he described her as ‘cute as a bug’s ear.' It wasn’t the metaphor Chee would have chosen, but it could fit Officer Bernadette Manuelito.

It was also at Oilmen’s that he learned Bai had been taking flying lessons.

“Flying lessons?” Chee said. “Really? Where?”

Chee’s source for this was a New Mexico State Police dispatcher named Alice Deal. She delayed taking the intended bite from her cheeseburger to wave the free hand toward the Farmington Airport, which sat, like the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, on the mesa looking down on the city.

The sign over the office door of Four Corners Flight declared it the source of charter flights, aircraft rentals, repair, sales, parts, supplies and FAA-certified flight instruction. It didn’t appear to be busy in any of those categories when Chee walked into the front office. The only person on the premises was a woman in the manager’s office. She interrupted her telephone conversation long enough to wave Chee in.

“Well, now,” she was saying, "that’s no way to behave. If Betty acts like that, I just wouldn’t invite her anymore." She motioned Chee into a chair, listened a moment longer, said, "Well, maybe you’re right. I’ve got a customer. Got to go,” and hung up.

Chee introduced himself and his subject.

“Bai,” she said. “He owes us for a couple of lessons. The FBI already talked to us about him.”

“Could you -"

“Matter of fact, they wanted the names of everybody we’d been teaching for way back. Then they came back again to talk specifically about Teddy.”

“Could you tell me if he had his license yet?”

“I doubt it. You’re-going to have to talk to Jim Edgar,” she said. “He’s out there talking to the people at the DOE copter, and if he’s not there, he’ll be working in the hangar.”

The copter was a big white Bell with Department of Energy identification markings. Round white bathtub-sized containers had been attached above the skids, and a woman in blue coveralls was doing something technical at one of them. The only others present were two men in the same sort of coveralls engaged in conversation. Probably pilot and copilot. Chee tried to guess what the big tubes would contain, with no luck. Obviously none of these people was Jim Edgar.

He found Edgar in the back of the hangar, muttering imprecations and doing something at a workbench to something that looked like a small electric engine. Chee stopped a polite distance away and stood waiting.

Edgar put down a small screwdriver, sucked at a freshly injured thumb and inspected Chee.

Chee explained himself.

“Teddy Bai,” Edgar said, inspecting his thumb as he said it. “Well, he’d soloed, but he wasn’t near ready to be licensed. He was sort of mediocre as a student. I already told the FBI fellas if he was going to be flying that old L-17, I didn’t want to be along on the trip.”

“That’s the one that was stolen? Why not?”

“He was learning in a new Cessna. Everything modern. Tricycle landing gear. Power-assisted stuff. Different instrumentation. Piper built that L-17 thing for the army in World War Two. Easy enough to fly, I guess, if you understand it, but you’d do a lot of things different than that little Cessna he was learning in.”

Edgar paused, seeking a way to explain this. “For example that was one of the first of that sort of plane to use wing flaps. But you can’t use ‘em on the L-17 if your airspeed is over eighty. And you have to set the tabs on the ground. Little things like that you have to know about.”

“And more than fifty years old,” Chee said. “Do you know anything about what shape it was in?”

Edgar laughed. “From what I heard on the television, the FBI thinks those casino robbers flew away in it. They better be lucky if they did. Unless Old Man Timms decided to spend some money on it since I saw it.”

Chee found himself getting more and more interested in this conversation.

“Was that recently? What was wrong with it?”

Edgar grinned at him. “How much time you got?”

“Any serious stuff?”

“Well, he brought it in for an FAA inspection last autumn. Wanted to get the FAA airworthy certification renewed. Way overdue anyway for an overage plane like that one, and he could have gotten in trouble for just flying it. First thing I noticed he’d let the mice get into it. He keeps it in a barn out at his ranch, which ain’t too uncommon out here. But if you do that, you’ve got to keep the rodents from chewing on things. Set the tail wheel in a bucket of kerosene, maybe. So the wiring and fabric needed inspection, and the engine was running sour. Then these things have twelve-gallon gasoline tanks built into each wing root, feeding into a header tank behind the engine fire wall. Had a little leak in one of the lines.”

Edgar shrugged. “Other things, too.”

“He got them fixed?”

“He got me to give him an estimate. Said it was way too damn high." Edgar chuckled. “Said he’d sell me the plane for half that. He was going to fly it up to Blanding and get the inspection done at CanyonAire up there. That’s the last I saw of him.”

“Would you have a phone number for Mr Timms?” Chee asked. “Or his address?”

“Sure.”

Edgar walked across the hangar to his desk and sorted through a Rolodex file. Chee stood watching, trying to understand his motive for what he was doing. What did this have to do with Bernie’s boyfriend’s problem? Had he spent so many hours fishing and fighting mosquitoes in Alaska that he yearned for some way to get himself into trouble? Was he hungering for some explanation of the wildly illogical way the casino bandits had managed their escape? Whatever his motive, Captain Largo would be very unhappy indeed if Largo learned that Chee had stuck his nose into FBI business and the FBI caught him at it.

Edgar interrupted these thoughts by handing him a copy of a Mountain Mutual Insurance claim form.

“He had me sign off on his insurance claim. He’d left the plane out in the weather and gotten some hail damage,” Edgar said. “That was several years ago, but as far as I heard, he hasn’t moved.”

Chee jotted the information he wanted into his notebook, thanked Edgar and headed back to his truck. Then a sudden thought caused him to grin. With the plane now stolen, Timms would be filing another insurance claim.

“Mr Edgar,” he shouted. “Do you remember what you’d have had to charge Timms for those repairs? When he said he’d sell it for half your estimate?”

“I think the estimate was close to four thousand dollars,” Edgar said. “But if I was stupid enough to want that thing, and made him an offer, he’d have said it was a valuable antique and asked for about thirty thousand.”

Chee laughed. That, he thought, would probably be about what Timms would claim from his insurance company.

“How about using your telephone?” Chee asked. “And the directory.”

He punched in the Mountain Mutual Insurance Farmington agent’s number, identified himself, asked the woman who ran the place if she still handled Eldon Timms's insurance.

“Unfortunately,” she said.

“His airplane, too?”

“Same answer,” she said. “Or I guess you’d say the former airplane, the one those robbers stole?”

“Does he have another one?”

“Lordy, I hope not,” she said.

“He file a claim on it?”

“Yes, indeedy, he did. Right away. I just heard about the robbers stealing a plane out there and flying off in it, and he’s on the phone asking about getting his money. And I said, “What’s the hurry. They have to land someplace and the cops recover it and you get it back.” And he said, “If that happens, we tear up the claim.”

“How much was the insurance?”

“Forty thousand,” she said. “He just jacked it up to that a couple of months ago.”

“Sounds like quite a bit for a fifty-year-old aircraft,” Chee said.

“I thought so,” she said. “But no skin off my nose. Timms was the one paying the premium. He said it was an antique, a real rare airplane, and he was going to sell it to that military-aircraft museum in Tucson. I have a feeling he was using that higher-insured value to sort of—you know—establish a sales price.”

Edgar had been standing nearby, listening.

“That do it for you?”

“Yeah,” Chee said, "and thanks. But by the way, what’s that Energy Department helicopter doing here? And what’s the DOE doing with those big white pods?”

“Actually, the pods aren’t DOE, they’re EPA,” Edgar said. “You are looking at a rare case of inter-agency cooperation. The Environmental Protection bunch borrows the copter and the pilots from the DOE’s Nevada Test site. They got radiation detectors in those pods, and they use them to find old uranium mines. Get the hot stuff covered up.”

After he left Four Corners Flight, Chee dropped in at the New Mexico State Police office below the airport and made two more calls—the first one to the Air War Museum at Tucson. Yes, the manager told him, Mr Timms had flown his L-17 down in June and offered it for sale. And, yes, they would have liked to add it to their collection, but they hadn’t made an offer. Why not? The usual reason, said the manager. He wanted way too much for it. He was asking fifty thousand.

The second call was to Cowboy Dashee, his old friend from boyhood. But it wasn’t just to reminisce. Deputy Sheriff Dashee worked for the Sheriff’s Department of Apache County, Arizona, which meant the ranch of Eldon Timms—at least the south end of it—might be in Deputy Dashee’s jurisdiction.

Chapter Six

For no reason except habit born of childhood in a crowded hogan, Joe Leaphorn awoke with the first light of dawn. The bedroom he and Emma had shared for three happy decades faced both the sunrise and the noisy street. When Leaphorn had noted the noise disadvantage to Emma she had pointed out that the quieter bedroom had no windows facing the dawn. No further explanation was needed.

Emma was a true Navajo traditional with the traditional’s need to greet the new day. That was one of the countless reasons Leaphorn loved her. Besides, while Leaphorn was no longer truly a traditional, no longer offered a pinch of pollen to the rising sun, he still treasured the old ways of his people.

This morning, however, he had a good reason for sleeping late. Professor Louisa Bourebonette was sleeping in the quieter bedroom, and Leaphorn didn’t want to awaken her. So he lay under the sheet, watched the eastern horizon turn flame red, listened to the automatic coffeemaker go to work in the kitchen, and considered what the devil to do with the names Gershwin had given him. The three had stolen themselves an airplane and flown away, which took some of the pressure off. Still, if Gershwin was right, having their identities would certainly be useful to those trying to catch them.

Leaphorn yawned, stretched, smelled coffee, wondered if he could get to the kitchen and pour a cup quietly enough not to disturb Louisa. Wondered, too, what solution she would offer for his dilemma if he presented it to her. Emma would have told him to forget it. Locking robbers in prison helped no one, she’d say. They should be cured of the disharmony that was causing this bad behavior. Prison didn’t accomplish that. A Mountain Way ceremony, with all their friends and relatives gathered to support them, would drive the dark wind out of them and restore them to hozho.

A clatter in the kitchen interrupted that thought. Leaphorn jumped out of bed and put on his bathrobe. He found Louisa standing at the stove, fully dressed and cooking pancakes.

“I’m using your mix,” she said. “They’d be a lot better if you had some buttermilk.”

Leaphorn rescued his mug from the sink, rinsed it, poured himself a cup, and sat by the table watching Louisa, remembering the ten thousand mornings he had watched Emma from the same chair. Emma was shorter, slimmer, and always wore skirts. Louisa had on jeans and a flannel shirt. Her hair was short and gray. Emma’s was long and a luminous black. That hair was her only source of vanity. Emma had hated to have it cut even for the brain surgery that killed her.

“You’re up early,” Leaphorn said.

“Blame it on your culture,” Louisa said. “These old-timers I need to talk to have been up an hour already. They’ll be in bed by sundown.”

“How about your translator? Did you ever manage to get hold of him?”

“I’ll try again after breakfast,” Louisa said. “Young people have more normal sleeping habits.”

They ate pancakes.

“Something’s on your mind,” Louisa said. “Right?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it’s true,” Louisa said. “I could tell last night when we were having dinner down at the Inn. Couple of times you started to say something, but you didn’t.”

True enough. And why hadn’t he? Because it would have taken him too close to his relationship with Emma—this hashing over of something he was working on. But now in the light of morning he saw nothing wrong with it. He told Louisa about Gershwin, the three names and his promise — ambiguous and vague.

“Did you shake hands on it? Any of that male-chivalry stuff?”

Leaphorn grinned. Louisa’s way of striking right to the heart of matters was something he liked about her.

“Well, we shook hands, but it was sort of a 'goodbye, glad to see you again,' handshake. No cutting our wrists and mixing blood,” he said. “He had the identification information written on a piece of paper, and he just left that on the table. With sort of an unspoken understanding that if I took it, I could do whatever I wanted with it. But promising him confidentiality was implied no matter what I did.”

“And you took the paper?”

“Not exactly. I read it, then wadded it up and dropped it in the wastebasket.”

She was smiling at him, shaking her head.

“You’re right,” he said. “Throwing it away didn’t work. I’m still stuck with the promise.”

She nodded, cleared her throat, sat very straight. “Mr Leaphorn,” she said, “I remind you that you are under oath to tell this grand jury the truth and the whole truth. How did you obtain this information?” Louisa stared over her glasses at him, her stern look. “Then you say you read it off a piece of paper left on a restaurant table, and the lawyer asks if you know who left the paper, and…"

Leaphorn raised his hand. “I know,” he said.

“Two choices, really. After all, that Gershwin jerk was just trying to use you. You could just forget it. Or you could figure out some sneaky way to get the names to the FBI. How about an anonymous letter? In fact, don’t you wonder why he didn’t write one himself?”

“I guess it was timing. A couple of days pass before the letter gets delivered. Then if it’s anonymous, it goes right to the bottom of the pile,” Leaphorn said. “I guess he knew that. I think he’s afraid these days. That the bandits know that he knows, and they don’t trust him, and if they aren’t caught, they’ll be coming after him.”

Louisa laughed. “I’d say they have pretty good reason not to trust him. You shouldn’t either.”

“I thought about faxing it in from some commercial place where nobody knows me, or sending an e-mail. But just about everything is traceable these days. And now there’s a reward out, so they’ll be getting dozens of tips by now. Probably hundreds.”

“I guess so,” Louisa said. “Why don’t you call one of your old FBI buddies? Do the same thing to them Gershwin’s doing to you?”

Leaphorn laughed. “I tried that. I called Jay Kennedy. You remember me telling you about him? Used to be Agent in Charge at Gallup, and we worked on several things together. Anyway, he’s retired over in Durango. So I tried it on him. No luck.”

“What did he say?”

“Same thing you just told me. If he passes it along to the Bureau, they ask him where he got it. He tells ‘em me. They ask me where I got it.”

“So what’s your solution? How about disguising your voice and giving them a telephone call?”

“I might try that. The FBI has them flying away. I could tell them one of the guys is a pilot. That would be easy for them to check, and if one of them happens to be a flier, then they’d be interested. But that’s just half of the problem."He paused to take another bite of pancake.

She watched him chew, waited, sighed. Said, “OK, what’s the other half?”

“Maybe these three guys had nothing to do with it. Maybe Gershwin just wants them hassled for some personal reason, and if the robbers aren’t caught, this would damn sure do that sooner or later.”

She nodded. “I’ll take it under advisement, then,” she said, and left the kitchen to call her interpreter.

By the time Leaphorn had the dishes washed she was back, looking disheartened.

“Not only is he sick, he has laryngitis. He can hardly talk. I guess I’ll head back to Flagstaff and try it later.”

“Too bad,” Leaphorn said.

“Another thing. He’d told them we were coming today. And no telephone, of course, to tell them we’re not.”

“Where do these guys live?”

Louisa’s expression brightened. “Are you about to volunteer to interpret? The Navajo’s a fellow named Dalton Cayodito and the address I have is Red Mesa Chapter House. The other one’s a Ute. Lives at Towaoc on the Ute Mountain Reservation. How’s your Ute?”

“Maybe fifty words or so,” Leaphorn said. “But I could help you with Cayodito.”

“Let’s do it,” Louisa said.

“I’m thinking that a couple of the men on that list are supposed to live up there in that border country. One of ’em’s Casa Del Eco Mesa. That couldn’t be too far from the chapter house.”

Louisa laughed. “Mixing business with pleasure. Or I should say your business with my business. Or maybe my business with something that really isn’t your business.”

“The one who has a place up there—according to the notes on that paper anyway—is Everett Jorie. I can’t place him, but the name’s familiar. Probably something out of the distant past. I thought we could ask around.”

Louisa was smiling at him. “You’ve forgotten you’re retired,” she said. “For a minute there, I thought you were going along for the pleasure of my company.”

Leaphorn drove the first lap—the 110 miles from his house to the Mexican Water Trading Post. They stopped there for a sandwich and to learn if anyone there knew how to find Dalton Cayodito. The teenage Navajo handling the cash register did.

“An old, old man,” she said. “Did he used to be a singer? If that’s him, he did the Yeibichai sing for my grandmother. Is that the one you’re looking for?”

Louisa said it was. “We heard he lived up by the Red Mesa Chapter House.”

“He lives with his daughter,” the girl said. “That’s Madeleine Horsekeeper, I think they call her. Her place is -" She paused, thought, made a gesture of frustration with her hands, penciled a map on a grocery sack and handed it to Louisa.

“How about a man named Everett Jorie?” Leap-horn said. “You know where to find him? Or Buddy Baker? Or George Ironhand.”

She didn’t, but the man who had been stacking Spam cans on shelves along the back wall thought he could help.

“Hey,” he said. “Joe Leaphorn. I thought you’d retired. What you want Jorie for? If you got a law against being a damned nuisance, you oughta had him locked up long ago.”

They left the trading post a quarter hour later armed with explicit instructions on how to find the two places Jorie might be located, an addendum to the grocery-sack map outlining which turns to take from which roads to find Ironhand, and a vague notion that Baker might have moved into Blanding. Along with that they took a wealth of speculative gossip about Utah-Arizona borderland political ambitions, social activities, speculation about who might have robbed the Ute Casino, an account of the most recent outrages committed by the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Park Service, and other federal, state and county agencies against the well-being of various folks who lived their hardscrabble lives along the Utah border canyon country.

“No wonder the militia nuts can sign people up,” Louisa said, as they drove away. “Is it as bad as that?”

“They’re mostly just trying to enforce unpopular laws,” Leaphorn said. “Mostly fine people. Now and then somebody gets arrogant.”

“OK, now,” Louisa said. “These guys you mentioned in there—Jorie and Ironhand and so forth. I guess they’re the three who robbed the casino?”

“Or maybe robbed it,” Leaphorn said. “If we believe Gershwin.”

Louisa was driving and spent a few moments looking thoughtful.

“You know,” she said, "as long as I’ve been out here I still can’t get used to how everybody knows everybody.”

“You mean that guy at the store recognizing me? I was a cop out here for years.”

“But living where? About a hundred and fifty miles away. But I didn’t mean just you. The cashier knew all about Everett Jorie. And people know about Baker and Ironhand living"—she waved an expressive hand at the window—"living way the hell out there someplace. Where I came from people didn’t even know who lived three houses down the block.”

“Lot more people in Baltimore,” Leaphorn said.

“Not a lot more people on our block.”

“More people in your block, I’ll bet, than in a twenty-mile circle around here,” Leaphorn said. He was remembering the times he’d spent in Washington, in New York, in Los Angeles, when he’d considered this difference between urban and rural social attitudes.

“I have a theory not yet endorsed by any sociologist,” he said. “You city folks have so many people crowding you they’re a bother. So you try to avoid them. We rural people don’t have enough, so we’re interested. We sort of collect them.”

“You’ll have to make it a lot more complicated than that to get the sociologists to adopt it,” Louisa said. “But I know what you’re driving at.”

“Out here, everybody looks at you,” he said. “You’re somebody different. Hey, here’s another human, and I don’t even know him yet. In the city, nobody wants to make eye contact. They have built themselves a little privacy bubble—hard to get any privacy in crowded places—and if you look at them, or speak on the street, then you’re an intruder.”

Louisa looked away from the road to give him a sidewise grin.

“I take it you don’t care for the busy, exciting, stimulating city life,” she said. “I’ve also heard it put another way. Like “rural folks tend to be nosy busy-bodies.”’

They were still discussing that when they turned off the pavement of U.S. 160 onto the dirt road that climbed over the Utah border onto the empty, broken highlands of the Casa Del Eco Mesa. She slowed while Leaphorn checked the map against the landscape. The clouds were climbing on the western horizon, and the outriders of the front were speckling the landscape spreading away to the west with a crazy-quilt pattern of shadows.

“If my memory’s good, we hit an intersection up here about seven miles,” he said. “Take the bad road to the right, and it takes you to the Red Mesa Chapter House. Take the worse road to the left, and it gets you to Highway 191 and on to Bluff.”

“There’s the junction up ahead,” she said. “We do a left? Right?”

“Left is right,” Leaphorn said. “And after the turn, we’re looking for a track off to our right.”

They found it, and a dusty, bumpy mile later, they came to the place of Madeleine Horsekeeper, which was a fairly new double-wide mobile home, with an attendant hogan of stacked stones, sheep pens, outhouse, brush arbor and two parked vehicles -an old pickup truck and a new blue Buick Regal. Madeleine Horsekeeper was standing in the doorway greeting them, with a stern-looking fortyish woman standing beside her. She proved to be Horsekeeper’s daughter, who taught social studies at Grey Hills High in Tuba City. She would sit in on the interview with Hosteen Cayodito, her maternal grandfather, and would make sure the interpreting was accurate. Or do it herself.

Which was fine with Joe Leaphorn. He had thought of a way to spend the rest of this day that would be much more interesting than listening for modifications and evolutions in the legends he’d grown up with. That talk with Louisa about how folks in lonely country knew everything about their neighbors had reminded him of Undersheriff Oliver Potts, now retired. If anyone knew the three on Gershwin’s list, it would be Oliver.

Chapter Seven

Oliver Potts’s modest stone residence was shaded by a grove of cottonwoods beside Recapture Creek, maybe five miles northeast of Bluff and a mile down a rocky road even worse than described at the Chevron station where Leaphorn had topped off his gas tank.

“Yes,” said the middle-aged Navajo woman who answered his knock, "Ollie’s in there resting his eyes." She laughed. “Or he’s supposed to be, anyway. Actually he’s probably reading, or studying one of his soap operas." She ushered Leaphorn into the living room, said, "Ollie, here’s company,” and disappeared.

Potts looked up from the television, examined Leaphorn through thick-lensed glasses. “Be damned. You look like Joe Leaphorn, but if it is, you’re out of uniform.”

“I’ve been out of uniform almost as long as you have,” Leaphorn said, "but not long enough to watch the soap operas.”

He took the chair Potts offered. They exhausted the social formalities, agreed retirement became tiresome after the first couple of months, and reached the pause that said it was time for business. Leaphorn recited Gershwin’s three names. Could Potts tell him anything about them?

Potts hadn’t seemed to be listening. He had laid himself back in his recliner chair, glasses off now and eyes almost closed, either dozing or thinking about it. After a moment he said, “Odd mix you got there. What kind of mischief have those fellows been up to?”

“Probably nothing,” Leaphorn said. “I’m just checking on some gossip.”

It took Potts a moment to accept that. His eyes remained closed, but a twist of his lips expressed skepticism. He nodded. “Actually, Ironhand and Baker fit well enough. We’ve had both of them in a time or two. Nothing serious that we could make stick. Simple assault, I think it was, on Baker, and a DWI and resisting arrest. George Ironhand, he’s a little meaner. If I remember right, it was assault with a deadly weapon, but he got off. And then we had him as a suspect one autumn butchering time in a little business about whose steers he was cutting up into steaks and stew beef.”

He produced a faint smile, reminiscing. “Turned out to be an honest mistake, if you know what I mean. And then, the feds got interested in him. Somebody prodded them into doing something about that protected antiquities law. They had the idea that his little bitty ranch was producing way too many of those old pots and the other Anasazi stuff he was selling. They couldn’t find no ruins on his place, and the feds figured he was climbing over the fence and digging them out of sites on federal land.”

“I remember that now,” Leaphorn said. “Nothing came of it? Right?”

“Usual outcome. Case got dropped for lack of evidence.”

“You said they fit better than Jorie. Why’s that?”

“Well, they’re both local fellas. Ironhand’s a Ute and Baker’s born in the county. Both rode in the rodeo a little, as I remember. Worked here and there. Probably didn’t finish high school. Sort of young." He grinned at Leaphorn. “By our standards, anyway. Thirty or forty. I think Baker is married. Or was.”

“They buddies?”

That produced another thoughtful silence. Then: "I think they both worked for El Paso Natural once, or one of the pipeline outfits. If it’s important, I can tell you who to ask. And then I think both of them were into that militia outfit. Minutemen I think they called it.”

Potts opened his eyes now, squinted, rubbed his hand across them, restored the glasses and looked at Leaphorn. “You heard of our militia?”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “They had an organizing meeting down at Shiprock last winter.”

“You sign up?”

“Dues were too high,” Leaphorn said. “But they seemed to be getting some recruits.”

“We got a couple of versions up here. Militia to protect us from the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service and the seventy-two other federal agencies. Then the survivalists, getting us ready for when all those black helicopters swarm in to round us up for the United Nations concentration camps. And then for the rich kids, we have our Save Our Mountains outfit trying to fix it so the Ivy Leaguers don’t have to associate with us redneck working folks when they want to get away from their tennis courts.”

Potts had his eyes closed again. Leaphorn waited, Navajo fashion, until he was sure Potts had finished this speech. He hadn’t.

“Come to think of it,” Potts added, "maybe that’s how you could tie in ole Everett Jorie. He used to be one of the militia bunch.”

Potts sat up. “Remember? He used to run that afternoon talk show on one of the Durango radio stations. Right-winger. Sort of an intellectual version of what’s his name? That fat guy. Ditto Head. Made him sound almost sane. Anyway, Jorie was always promoting the militia. He’d quote Plato, and

Shakespeare and read passages from Thoreau and Thomas Paine to do it. Finally got so wild the station fired him. I think he was a fairly big shot in the militia. I heard Baker was a member. At least I’d see him at meetings. I think I saw George at one, too.”

“Jorie still in the militia?”

“I don’t think so,” Potts said. “Heard they had a big falling-out. It’s all hearsay, of course, but the gossip was he wanted ’em to do less talking and writing to their congressman and things like that and get more dramatic"

Potts had his eyes wide open now, peering at Leaphorn, awaiting the question.

“Like what?”

“Just gossip, you know. But like blowing up a Forest Service office.”

“Or maybe a dam?”

Potts chuckled. “You’re thinking of that big manhunt a while back. When the guys stole the water truck and shot the policeman, and the FBI decided they were going to fill the truck with explosives, blow up the dam and drain Lake Mead.”

“What’s your theory on that one?”

“Stealing the water truck? I figured they needed it to water their marijuana crop.”

Leaphorn nodded.

“FBI didn’t buy that. I guess there was budget hearings coming up. They needed some terrorism to talk about, and if it’s just pot farmers at work, that hands the ball to the Drug Enforcement folks. The competition. The enemy.”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said.

“Now,” Potts said, "it is time for you to tell me what you’re up to. I heard you been working as a private investigator. Did the Ute Casino people sign you up to get their money back?”

“No,” Leaphorn said. “Tell the truth I don’t know what I’m up to myself. Just heard something, and had time on my hands, and got to wondering about it, so I thought I’d ask around.”

“Just bored then,” Potts said, sounding as if he didn’t believe it. “Nothing interesting on TV, so you thought you’d just take a three-hour drive up here to Utah and do some visiting. Is that it?”

“That’s close enough,” Leaphorn said. “And I’ve got one more name to ask about. You know Roy Gershwin?”

“Everybody knows Roy Gershwin. What’s he up to?”

“Is there anything to connect him to the other three?”

Potts thought about it. “I don’t know why I want to tell you anything, Joe, when you won’t tell me why you’re askin‘. But, let’s see. He used to show up at militia meetings a while back. He was fighting with the BLM, and the Forest Service, and the Soil Conservation Service, or whatever they call it now, over a grazing lease and over a timber-cutting permit, too, I think it was. That had gotten him into an antigovernment mood. I think Baker used to work for him once on that ranch he runs. And I think his place runs up against Jorie’s, so that makes them neighbors.”

“Good neighbors?”

Potts restored his glasses, sat up and looked at Leaphorn. “Don’t you remember Gershwin? He wasn’t the kind of fellow you were good neighbors with. And Jorie’s even worse. As a matter of fact, I think Jorie was suing Roy over something or other. Suing people was one of Jorie’s hobbies.”

“About what?”

Potts shrugged. “This and that. He sued me once ‘cause his livestock was running on my place, and I penned them up, and he wanted to take ’em back without paying me for my feed. With Gershwin, I don’t remember. I think they were fighting over the boundaries of a grazing lease.” He paused, considering. “Or maybe it was locking a gate on an access road.”

“Were any of those three people pilots?”

“Fly airplanes?” Potts was grinning. “Like rob the Ute Casino and then stealing Old Man Timms’s airplane to fly away? I thought you was retired from being a cop.”

Leaphorn could think of no response to that.

“You think maybe those three guys did it?” Potts said. “Well, that’s as good a guess as I could make. Why not? You have any idea where they’d fly to?”

“No ideas about anything much,” Leaphorn said. “I’m just idling away some time.”

“Several ranchers around here have their little planes,” Potts said. “None of those guys, though. I remember hearing Jorie going on about flying for the navy on his talk show, but I know he didn’t have a plane. And airplanes was one of the things Jorie used to bitch about. People flying over his ranch. Said they scared his livestock. He thought it was people spying on him when he was stealing pots. Baker and Ironhand now. Far as I know, neither of them ever had anything better than a used pickup.”

“You know where Jorie lives?” Leaphorn asked.

Potts stared at him. “You going to go see him? What you going to say? Did you rob the casino? Shoot the cops?”

“If he did, he won’t be home. Remember? He flew away.”

“Oh, right,” Potts said, and laughed. “If the Federal Bureau of Ineptitude says it, it must be true." He pushed himself up. “Let me get myself a piece of paper and my pencil. I’ll draw you a little map.”

Chapter Eight

Cowboy Dashee rolled down the window of Apache County Sheriff’s Department Patrol Unit 4 as Chee walked up. He leaned out, staring at Chee.

“The cooler’s in the trunk,” Dashee said. “Dry ice in it, with room enough for about forty pounds of smoked Alaska salmon caught by my Navajo friend. But where’s the damned fish?”

“I hate to tell you about that,” Chee said. “The girls had this big welcome-home salmonfest for me at Shiprock. Dancing around the campfire down by the San Juan, swimming bareback in the river. Just me and nine of those pretty teachers from the community college." Chee opened the passenger-side door and slid in. “I should have remembered to invite you.”

“You should have,” Dashee said. “Since you’re going to work me for some favor. From what you said on the telephone, you’re going to try to get me in trouble with the FBI. What do you want me to do?”

They’d met at the Lukachukai Chapter House, Chee making the long drive from Farmington over the Chuska Mountains and Dashee up from his station at Chinle. Dashee arrived a little late. And now was accused by Chee of being corrupted from his stern Hopi ways and learning how to operate on ‘Navajo Time,' which recognized neither late nor early. They wasted a few minutes exchanging barbs and grinning at one another as old friends do, before Chee answered Dashee’s question.

“What I’d like you to do is help me get straightened out on that business with the stolen airplane,” Chee said.

“Eldon Timms’s airplane? What’s to straighten out? The bandidos stole it and flew away. And thank God for that." Dashee made a wry face. “If you see it anywhere, just call the nearest office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

“You think that’s what actually happened?”

Dashee laughed. “Let’s just say I hope the feds got it right this time. Otherwise, we both ought to apply for a leave. I don’t think I could stand a repeat of that Great Four Corners Manhunt of 1998. You want to go crashing around in the canyons again?”

“I could get along without that,” Chee said, and told Dashee what he’d learned about the Timms

L-17, and the insurance, and Timms’s futile effort to sell it, and all the rest. “You mind us driving over there and showing me where the pickup was found, and the barn where Timms kept the plane? Just going over that part of it with me?”

Dashee studied him. “You’re wanting to use your old buddy Cowboy because you’re not back on duty yet, and don’t have any business out there anyway even if you were. And me, being a deputy sheriff of Apache County, Arizona, could claim I had some legitimate reason to be butting in on a case the FBI has taken over. So if the feds get huffy about us nosy locals, they can blame me. Am I right?”

“That’s about it,” Chee said. “Does it make sense to you?”

Dashee snorted, started the engine. “Well, then, let’s go. Let’s get there while we still have a little daylight.”

The sun was low when Dashee stopped the patrol car. The ragged top of Comb Ridge to the west was producing a zigzag pattern of light and shadow across the sagebrush flats of the Nokaito Bench. The Gothic Creek bottoms below were already a crooked streak of darkness. Dashee was pointing down into the canyon. “Down there but for the grace of God and Timms’s convenient airplane go you and I,” he said. “Once again testing the federal law-enforcement theory that to locate fugitives you send out local cops until the perps start shooting them, thereby giving away their location.”

“It used to work in India when the nabobs were hunting tigers,” Cree said. “Only they did it with beaters instead of deputy sheriffs. They’d send those guys in to provoke the animals.”

“I thought they used goats.”

“That was later,” Chee said. “After the beaters joined the union. Now why not tell me why we’re stopping here.”

“High ground. You can see the lay of the land from here.“ Dashee pointed northeast. “Up there, maybe three miles, is the Timms place. You can’t see it because it’s beyond that ridge, down a slope." He pointed again. “This road we’re on angles along the rim of the mesa over Gothic Creek, then swings back past the Timms place, and then sort of peters out at a widow woman’s ranch up toward the San Juan. That’s the end of it. The truck was abandoned about a mile and a half up ahead.”

Chee hoisted himself onto the front fender. “All I know about this case is what I’ve heard since I got home. Fill me in. What’s the official Theory of the Crime?”

Dashee grinned. “You think the feds would tell an Apache County deputy?”

“No. But somebody in the Denver FBI, or maybe the Salt Lake office, or Phoenix, or Albuquerque, fills in some state-level cop, and he tells somebody else, and the word spreads and pretty soon somebody else tells your sheriff, and —" Chee made an all-encompassing gesture. “So everybody knows in about three hours, and the federals maintain their deniability.”

“OK,” Dashee said. “What we hear goes like this. This Teddy Bai fella, the one the FBI is holding at the Farmington hospital, he tells some of the wrong people how easy it would be to rob the Ute Casino, and the word gets back to some medium-level hoods. Maybe Las Vegas hoods, maybe Los Angeles. I’ve heard it both ways, and it’s just guesswork. Anyway, the theory is Bai gets contacted. He’s offered a slice if he’ll help with the details, like getting the timing just right, all the inside stuff they need to know. Who’s on guard when. When the bank truck comes. How to cut off the power, telephones, so forth. Bai is a flier, he tells them that Timms has this old army short-takeoff recon airplane they can grab for the getaway. He’ll fly it for them. But they know that Bai’s local. He’ll be missed. He’ll be the way the hoods planning this can be traced. So they bring along their own pilot, shoot Bai, drive out to the Timms place, tear up the pickup truck so the cops will think they had to abandon it out here, steal the plane and"—(Dashee flapped his arms)—"away they go.”

Chee nodded.

“You’re thinking about Timms,” Dashee said. “The theory is they planned to kill him, too. That would have given them more time. But he wasn’t home. On his way home Timms heard about the robbery on the news and then found the lock on his barn busted, and his airplane gone, and he notified the cops. And since we’re closest, we got sent to check it out.”

Chee nodded again.

“You don’t like that, either?”

“I’m just thinking,” Chee said. “Show me where they left the truck.”

Doing that took them into the rugged, stony treeless territory where no one except surveyors seems to know exactly where Arizona ends and Utah begins. It involved a descent on a bad dirt road from the mesa top and took them past a flat expanse of drought-dwarfed sage where a white tanker truck was parked with its door open and a man sitting in the front seat reading something.

Dashee waved at him. “Rosie Rosner,” Dashee said. “Claims he has the easiest job in North America. Even easier than being a deputy. Three or four times a day an Environmental Protection Agency copter flies in here, he refuels it, and then nods off again until it comes back.”

“I think I saw that copter at the Farmington Airport,” Chee said. “Guy there said they’re locating abandoned uranium mines. Looking for radioactive dumps.”

“I asked the guy if he’d seen our bandidos driving in,” Dashee said. “But no such luck. They started doing this the next day.”

Dashee honked at the driver and waved. “Come to think of it, I guess the timing was pretty lucky for him.”

About a mile beyond the refueling truck Dashee stopped again and got out.

“Take a look at this.“ He pointed to a black outcrop of basalt beside the track, partly hidden by an outstretched limb of a four-wing salt bush and a collection of tumbleweeds.

“Here’s where they banged up their oil pan on the truck,” he said. “Either they didn’t know the road, or they weren’t paying attention or they swerved just a little bit to do it on purpose.”

“So we’d think they abandoned the truck because they didn’t have any choice,” Chee said.

“Maybe. You’d see they didn’t drive it much farther.”

After another few hundred yards Dashee turned off the packed earth of the unimproved road into an even vaguer track. He rolled the patrol car down a slope into a place where humps of blown sand supported a growth of Mormon tea and a few scraggly junipers.

“Here we are,” he said. “I’m parking just about exactly where they left the pickup.”

Chee climbed one of the mounds, looked down at the place the truck had been and all around.

“Could you see the truck from the track? Just driving past?”

“If you knew where to look,” Dashee said. “And Timms would have noticed the oil leak, and the tracks turning off. He would have been looking.”

“You find any tracks?”

“Sure,” Dashee said. “Both sides of the truck where they got out. Two sets. Then somebody told the feds, and here comes the copters full of the city boys in their bulletproof suits.”

“The copters blew away the tracks?”

Dashee nodded. “Just like they did it for us in the ‘98 business. When I called it in, I asked ’em to warn the feds about that.” Dashee laughed. “They said that’d be like trying to tell the pope how to hear confessions. Anyway, the light wasn’t too bad, and I took a roll of photographs. Boot prints and the places they put stuff they unloaded.”

“Like what?”

“Mark left by a rifle butt. Something that might have been a box. Big sack. So forth.“ Dashee shrugged.

Chee laughed. “Like a sack full of Ute Casino money, maybe. By the way, how much did they get?”

“An “undetermined amount,” according to the FBI. But the unofficial and approximate estimate I hear it was four hundred and eighty-six thousand, nine hundred and eleven dollars.”

Chee whistled.

“All unmarked money, of course,” Dashee added. “And lots of pockets full of big-value chips which honest folks grabbed off the roulette tables while escaping in the darkness.”

“Did the tracks head right off toward the Timms place? Or where?”

“We didn’t have much time to look. The sheriff called right back and said the FBI wanted us not to mess around the scene. Just back off and guard the place.”

“Not much time to look, huh?” Chee said. “What did you see when you did look? What was in the truck?”

“Nothing much. They’d stolen it off of one of those Mobil Oil pump jack sites, and it had some of those greasy wrenches, wipe rags, empty beer cans, hamburger wrappers, so forth. Stuff left under the seats and on the floorboards. Girlie magazine in a door side pocket, receipts for some gas purchases.“ Dashee shrugged. “About what you’d expect.”

“Anything in the truck bed?”

“We thought we had something there,” Dashee said. “A good-as-new-looking transistor radio there on the truck bed. Looked expensive, too.“ He shrugged. “But it was broken.”

“Broken. It wouldn’t play?”

“Not a sound,” Dashee said. “Maybe the battery was down. Maybe it broke when whoever threw it back there.”

“More likely they threw it back there because it was already broken,” Chee said. He was staring westward, down into the wash, and past it into the broken Utah border country, the labyrinth of canyons and mesa where the Navajo Tribal Police, and police from a score of other state, federal and county agencies had searched for the killers in the ’98 manhunt.

“You know, Cowboy,” Chee said, ”I’ve got a feeling we’re a little bit north of your jurisdiction here. I think Apache County and Arizona stopped a mile or two back there and we’re in Utah.”

“Who cares?” Dashee said. “What’s more interesting is you can’t see Timms place from here. It’s maybe a mile down the track.”

“Let’s go take a look,” Chee said.

It was, judging by the police car odometer, 1.3 miles. The road wandered down a slope into a sagebrush flat, to a pitched-roof stone house and a cluster of outbuildings. A plank barn with a red tar-paper roof dominated the scene. From a pole jutting above it a white wind sock dangled, awaiting a breeze to return it to duty. Chee noticed an east-west strip of the flat had been graded clear of brush. He also noticed that the road continued beyond this place, reduced to a set of parallel ruts and wandering across the flat to disappear over a ridge.

Chee pointed. “Where’s it go?”

“Another three, four miles, there’s another little ranch, the widow I told you about,” Dashee said. “It dead-ends there.”

“No outlet then? Back to the highway?”

“Unless you can fly,” Dashee said.

“I had been thinking that maybe the perps had turned off on this road figuring they’d circle past a roadblock on U.S. 191 up toward Bluff. I guess that would mean they didn’t know this country.”

“Yeah,” Dashee said, "I thought about that. The feds figured it means they knew the Timms airplane was there waiting for them.”

“Or they knew a trail down into Gothic Canyon, and down that to the San Juan, and down the river to some other canyon.”

“Oh, man,” Dashee said. “Don’t even think of that.“ And he pulled the car into Eldon Timms’s dusty yard.

A woman was standing on the shady side of the house watching them. Wearing jeans, well-worn boots, a man’s shirt with the sleeves rolled and a wide-brimmed straw hat. About middle seventies, Chee guessed. But maybe a little younger. Whites didn’t have the skin to deal with this dry sunshine. They wrinkled up about ten years early. She was walking toward the car as Chee and Dashee got out, squinting at them.

“That’s Eleanor Ashby,” Dashee said. “Widow living over the hill there. She looks after Timms’s livestock when he’s away. She said they trade off.”

“Sheriff,” Eleanor Ashby said, "what brings you back over here? You forget something?”

“We were looking for Mr Timms,” Dashee said, and introduced Chee and himself. “I forgot some things I wanted to ask him.”

“You needed to go to Blanding to do that,” she said. “He headed up there this morning to talk to the insurance people.”

“Well, it’s nothing important. Just some details I needed to fill in for the paperwork. I forgot to ask him what time of day it was he got back here and found his airplane was missing. But it can wait. I’ll catch him next time I get back up this way.”

“Maybe I can help you with that,” Eleanor said. “Let me think just for a minute, and I can get close to it. He was supposed to bring me some stuff from Blanding, and I thought I’d heard an airplane, so I came on over. Thinking he’d gotten home, but he wasn’t back yet.”

“About noon?” Chee asked. “You’re lucky you weren’t here when the bandits were.”

“Don’t I know it,” Eleanor said. “They just might have shot me. Or taken me as a hostage. God knows what. Still scares me when I think about it.”

“That plane you heard. You think that was the bandits flying off in Mr Timms’s airplane?”

“No. I just figured Timms had flown over to take a look, and then went on over to the other little place he has over by Mexican Water.”

Chee looked at Dashee and found Dashee looking at him.

“Wait a minute,” Dashee said. “You mean Timms had flown the plane up to Blanding?”

Eleanor laughed. “Course not,” she said. “But that’s what I was thinking. Sometimes he took the plane, if he could land where he was going. Sometimes he took his truck.”

“But the plane was here when you came by at noon?” Chee asked.

She nodded. “Yeah. Locked in the barn.”

“You saw it in there?”

“I saw that big old lock he uses on the door hasp." She chuckled. “You lock that old airplane in there, it can’t get out.”

“You didn’t see his truck?” Chee asked.

“It wasn’t here. He -" She frowned at Chee. “What do you mean. What are you thinking?”

“Does he just leave his truck out front?” Dashee asked. “Or somewhere you could have seen it?”

“He keeps it in that shed behind the house,” Mrs Eleanor Ashby said, and her expression suggested she suddenly was confronting a headful of questions.

“You weren’t here when Timms finally did get home?” Dashee asked.

“I was back at my house. Then the next day, a car drove up with the two FBI men in it. They asked me if I’d heard an airplane flying over. I told them what I’ve told you. They wanted to know if anybody had come around the Timms place while I was there. I said no. That was about it.”

That was about it for Dashee and Chee as well. They took a look at the barn, at the broken hasp, looked around for tracks and found nothing useful. Then they drove south through the dying red flare of twilight toward Mexican Water, where Eldon Timms had his other little place, where they dearly hoped, prayed, in fact, they would not find an L-17 hidden.

“If it’s there,” Dashee said, "then I tell the sheriff, and he tells the FBI, and old Eldon Timms gets sent up for insurance fraud and what else? Obstruction of justice?”

“Probably,” Chee said. But he was thinking of three men, nameless, faceless, utterly unidentified, armed with automatic rifles. They had already killed a policeman, wounded another and tried to kill a third. Three killers at large in the Four Corners canyon country. He was wondering how many more would die before this thing was over.

Chapter Nine

The little map Potts had drawn for Leaphorn on a sheet of notepaper took him across the San Juan down the asphalt of Highway 35 into the Aneth Oil Field, and thence onto a dirt road which led up the slopes of Casa Del Eco Mesa. It wandered past the roofless, windowless stone buildings which Potts had said were the relics of Jorie’s ill-fated effort to run a trading post. Two dusty, bumpy miles later it brought him to the drainage that Potts had labeled Desert Creek. Leaphorn stopped there, let the dust settle a moment and looked down the slope. He saw a crooked line of pale green cottonwoods, gray-green Russian olives and silver-gray chamisa brush marking the course of the creek, the red roof of a house, a horse corral, sheep pens, a stack of hay bales protected by a vast sheet of plastic, and a windmill beside the round galvanized-metal form of the tank which received its water. Snaking down the slope along the road was a telephone line, sagging along between widely spaced poles.

Memory clicked in. He’d been there before. Now he knew why Jorie’s name had rung a bell. He’d come to this ranch at least twenty-five years ago to deal with a complaint from a rancher that Jorie was shooting at him when he flew his airplane over. Jorie had been amiable about it. He had been shooting at crows, he said, but he sure did wish that Leaphorn would tell the fellow that flying so low over his place bothered his cattle. And apparently that had ended that—just another of the thousands of jobs rural policemen get solving little social problems among people turned eccentric by an overdose of dramatic skyscapes, endless silence and loneliness.

Leaphorn fished his binoculars from the glove box for a closer look. Nothing much had changed. The windmill tower now also supported what seemed to be an antenna, which meant Jorie—like many empty-country ranchers living beyond the reach of even Rural Electrification Administration power lines—had invested in radio communication. And the windmill was also rigged to turn a generator to provide the house with some battery-stored electricity. A little green tractor, dappled with rust and equipped with a front-end loader, was parked in the otherwise-empty horse corral. No other vehicle was visible, which didn’t mean one wasn’t sitting somewhere out of sight.

Leaphorn found himself surprised by this. He’d expected to see a pickup, or whatever Jorie drove, parked by the house and Jorie working on something by one of the outbuildings. He’d expected to confirm that Jorie had not flown away with the Ute Casino loot and that Gershwin had been using him in some sort of convoluted scheme. He leaned back on the truck seat, stretched out his legs, and thought the whole business through again. A waste of time? Probably. How about dangerous? He didn’t think so, but he’d have an explanation for this visit handy if Jorie came to the door and invited him in. He shifted the truck back into gear, drove slowly down the slope, parked under the cotton wood nearest the front porch and waited a few moments for his arrival to be acknowledged.

Nothing happened. No one appeared at the front door to note his arrival. He listened and heard nothing. He got out of the truck, closed the door carefully and silently, and walked toward the house, up the stone front steps, and tapped his knuckles against the doorframe. No response. A faint sound. Or had he imagined it?

“Hello,” Leaphorn shouted. “Anyone home?”

No answer. He knocked again. Then stood, ear to the door, listening. He tried the knob, gently. Not locked, which wasn’t surprising and didn’t necessarily mean Jorie was home. Locking doors in this empty country was considered needless, fruitless and insulting to one’s neighbors. If a thief wanted in, it would be about as easy to break the glass and climb in through a window.

But what was he hearing now?

A dim, almost imperceptible high note. Repeated. Repeated. Then a different sound. Something like a whistle. Birdsong? Now a bit of the music meadow-larks make at first flight. Leaphorn moved down the porch to a front window, shaded the glass with his hands and peered in. He looked into a dark room, cluttered with furniture, rows of shelved books, the dark shape of a television set.

He stepped off the end of the porch, walked around the corner, of the house and stopped at the first window. The front of a green Ford 150 pickup jutted out from behind the house. Jorie’s? Or someone else’s? Perhaps Buddy Baker. Or Ironhand. Or both. Leaphorn became abruptly conscious that he was a civilian. That he didn’t have the .38-caliber revolver he would have had with him if he was a law officer on duty. He shook his head. This uneasiness was groundless. He walked to the corner of the house. The truck was an oversize-cab model with no one visible in it. He reached through the open window and pulled down the sunshade. Clipped on it was the required liability-insurance certification in Jorie’s name. The cab was cluttered with trash, part of a newspaper, an Arby’s sandwich sack, a bent drinking straw, three red poker chips—the twenty-five-dollar denomination bearing the Ute Casino symbol—on the passenger-side seat.

Leaphorn considered the implications of that a moment, then walked back to the house, put his forehead against the glass, shaded his eyes and looked into what seemed to be a bedroom also used as an office.

Once again he heard the birdcalls, more distinct now. To his right, close to the window, a single bright spot in the darkness attracted his eye. What seemed to be a small television screen presented the image of a meadow, a pond, a shady woods, birds. His eyes adjusted to the dimness. It was a computer monitor. He was seeing the screen saver. As he looked the scene shifted to broken clouds, a formation of geese. The birdsong became honking.

Leaphorn looked away from the screen to complete a scanning of the room. He sucked in his breath. Someone was slumped in the chair in front of the computer, leaning away, against an adjoining desk. Asleep? He doubted it. The position was too awkward for sleep.

Leaphorn hurried back across the porch, opened the door, shouted, “Hello. Hello. Anyone home?” and trotted through the living room into the bedroom.

The form in the chair was a small, gray-haired man, wearing a white T-shirt with HANG UP AND DRIVE printed across the back, new-looking jeans and bedroom slippers. His left arm rested on the tabletop adjoining the computer stand, and his head rested upon it with his face illuminated by the light from the monitor. The light brightened as the screen saver presented a new set of birds. That caused the color of the blood that had seeped down from the hole above his right eye to change from almost black to a dark red.

Everett Jorie, Leaphorn thought. How long have you been dead? And how many years as a policeman does it take for me to get used to this? And understand it? And where is the person who killed you?

He stepped back from Jorie’s chair and surveyed the room, looking for the telephone and seeing it behind the computer with two stacks of the red Ute Casino chips beside it. Jorie was irrevocably dead. Calling the sheriff could wait for a few moments. First he would look around.

A pistol lay partly under the computer stand, beside the dead man’s foot—a short-barreled revolver much like the one Leaphorn had carried before his retirement. If there was a smell of burned gunpowder in the room, it was too faint for him to separate from the mixed aromas of dust, the old wool rug under his feet, mildew and the outdoor scents of hay, horse manure, sage and dry-country summer invading through the open window.

Leaphorn squatted beside the computer, took his pen from his shirt pocket, knelt, inserted it into the gun barrel, lifted the weapon and inspected the cylinder. One of the cartridges it held had been fired. He took out his handkerchief, pushed the cylinder release and swung it open. The cartridge over the chamber was also empty. Perhaps Jorie had carried the pistol with the hammer over a discharged round instead of an empty chamber, a sensible safety precaution. Perhaps he didn’t. That was something to be left to others to determine. He returned the pistol to its position beside the victim’s foot, slid out the ballpoint, then stood for a moment, holding the pen and studying the room.

It held a small, neatly made double bed. Beyond the bed, an automatic rifle leaned against the wall, an AK-47. A little table beside it held a lamp, an empty water glass and two books. One was The Virtue of Civility, with the subtitle of“Selected Essays on Liberalism.” The other lay on its back, open.

Leaphorn checked the page, used the pen to close it. The cover title read: Cato’s Letters: Essays on Liberty. He flipped the book open again, remembering it from a political science course in his undergraduate days at Arizona State. Appropriate reading for someone trying to go to sleep. The bookshelves along the wall were lined with similar fare: J.F. Cooper’s The American Democrat, Burke’s Further Reflections on the Revolution in France, Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government, de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, along with an array of political biographies, autobiographies and histories. Leaphorn extracted The Servile State from its shelf, opened it and read a few lines for the sake of Hilaire Belloc’s poetic polemics. He’d read that one and a few of the others thirty years or so ago in his period of fascination with political theory. Most of them were strange to him, but the titles were enough to tell him that he’d find no socialists among Jorie’s heroes.

He located Jorie’s telephone book in an out basket beside the phone, found he could still remember the proper sheriff’s number and picked up the telephone receiver. From the computer came an odd gargling sound. The screen was displaying a long V of sandhill cranes migrating against a winter sky. Leaphorn put down the phone, took his ballpoint pen, and tapped the computer mouse twice.

The cranes and their gargling vanished—instantly replaced on the screen by text. Leaphorn leaned past the body and read:

NOTICE: To anyone who might care, if such person exists, I declare 1 am about to close in appropriate fashion my wasted life. Fittingly, it ends with another betrayal. The sortie against the Ute Casino, which 1 foolishly believed would help finance our struggle against federal despotism, has served instead to finance only greed—and that at the needless cost of lives.

My only profit from this note will be revenge, which the philosophers have told us is sweet. Sweet or not, I trust it will remove from society two scoundrels, betrayers of trust, traitors to the cause of liberty and American ideals of freedom, civil rights and escape from the oppression of an arrogant and tyrannical federal government.

The traitors are George (Badger) lronhand, a Ute Indian who runs cattle north of Montezuma Creek, and Alexander (Buddy) Baker, whose residence is just north of the highway between Bluff and Mexican Hat. It was lronhand who shot the two victims at the casino and Baker who shot at the policeman near Aneth. Both of these shootings were in direct defiance of my orders and in violation of our plan, which was to obtain the cash collection from the casino without causing injury. We intended to take advantage of the confusion caused by the power failure and the darkness and to cause injury to no one. Both lronhand and Baker were aware of the policy of gambling casinos, following the pattern set in Las Vegas, of instructing security guards not to use their weapons due to the risk of injury to clients and to the devastating publicity and loss of revenue such injuries would produce. Thus the deaths at the casino were unplanned, unprovoked, unnecessary and directly contrary to my instructions.

By the time we reached the point where we had planned to abandon the vehicle and return to our homes it had become clear to me that this violence had been privately planned by lronhand and Baker and that their plan also included my own murder and their appropriation of the proceeds for their private and personal use. Therefore, I slipped away at the first opportunity.

I have no apologies for the operation. Its cause was just—to finance the continued efforts of those of us who value our political freedom more than life itself, to forward our campaign to save the American Republic from the growing abuses of our socialist government, and to foil its conspiracy to subject American citizens to the yoke of a world government.

It would not serve our cause for me to stand the pseudo trial which would follow my arrest. The servile media would use it to make patriots appear to be no more than robbers. I prefer to sentence myself to death rather than endure either a public execution or life imprisonment.

However, arrest of lronhand and Baker and the recovery of the casino proceeds they have taken would demonstrate to the world that their murderous actions were those of two common criminals seeking their own profits and not the intentions of patriots. If you do not find them at their homes, I suggest you check Recapture Creek Canyon below the Bluff Bench escarpment and just south of the White Mesa Ute Reservation, lronhand has relatives and friends among the Utes there, and I have heard him talking to Baker about a free flowing spring and an abandoned sheepherder’s shack there.

I must also warn that after the business was done at the casino, these two men swore a solemn oath in my presence not to be taken alive. They accused me of cowardice and boasted that they would kill as many policemen as they could. They said that if they were ever surrounded and threatened with capture, they would continue killing police under the pretext of surrendering.

Long Live Liberty and all free men. Long live America.

I now die for it. Everett Emerson Jorie

Leaphorn read through the text again. Then he picked up the telephone, dialed the sheriff’s office number, identified himself, asked for the officer in charge and described what he had found at the residence of Everett Jorie.

“No use for an ambulance,” Leaphorn said. And yes, he would wait until officers arrived and make sure that the crime scene was not disturbed.

That done, Leaphorn walked slowly through the rest of Jorie’s home—looking but not touching. Back in Jorie’s office, the sandhill cranes were again soaring across the computer screen saver, projecting an odd flickering illumination on the walls of the twilight room. Leaphorn tapped the mouse with his pen again, and reread the text of Jorie’s note a third time. He checked the printer’s paper supply, click on the PRINT icon, and folded the printout into his hip pocket. Then he went out onto the front porch and sat, watching the sunset give the thunderclouds on the western horizon silver fringes and turn them into yellow flame and dark red, and fade away into darkness.

Venus was bright in the western sky when he heard the police cars coming.

Chapter Ten

Jim Chee turned down a side road on the high side of Ship Rock and parked at a place offering a view of both the Navajo Tribal Police district office beside Highway 666 and his own trailer house under the cottonwoods beside the San Juan River. He got out, focused his binoculars and examined both locations. As he feared, the NTP lot was crowded with vehicles, including New Mexico State Police black-and-whites, some Apache and Navajo County Sheriffs’ cars, and three of those shiny black Fords instantly identifiable by all, cops and criminals alike, as the unmarked cars used by the FBI. It was exactly what the newscasts had led him to expect. The word was out that the missing L-17 had been found resting in a hay shed near Red Mesa. Thus the fervent hope of all Four Corners cops that the Ute Casino bandits had flown away to make themselves someone else’s problem in another and far-distant jurisdiction had been dashed. That meant leaves would be canceled, everybody would be working overtime—including Sergeant Jim Chee unless he could keep out of sight and out of touch.

He focused on his own place. No vehicles were parked amid the cottonwoods that shaded his house trailer, so maybe no one was there waiting to order him back to duty. Chee had time left on his leave. He’d spent the morning making the long drive to the west slope of the Chuska range and then into high country to the place where Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai had always spent his summers tending his sheep, and where he now spent them doing the long slide into death by lung cancer. But Nakai wasn’t there. And neither was his wife, Blue Woman, nor their truck.

Chee was disappointed. He’d wanted to tell Nakai that he’d been right about Janet Pete—that marriage with his beautiful, chic, brilliant silver-spoon socialite lawyer would never work. Either she would give up her ambitions, stay with him in Dinetah and be miserable, or he’d take the long bitter step out of the Land Between the Sacred Mountains and become a miserable success. In his gentle, oblique way, Nakai had tried to show him that, and he wanted to tell the man that he’d finally seen it for himself. Chee hung around for a while, thinking Nakai would be back soon. Even with his cancer in one of its periodic remissions, he wouldn’t be strong enough for any extended travels. Certainly Nakai wouldn’t be strong enough to conduct any of the curing ceremonials that his role as a yataalii required of him.

When the sun dipped behind the thunderheads over Black Mesa on the western horizon, Chee gave up and headed home. He would try again tomorrow unless Captain Largo located him. If that happened, he’d be spending what was left of his vacation trudging up and down canyons, serving as live bait for three fellows armed with automatic rifles and a demonstrated willingness to shoot cops.

Now he put his binoculars back into their case, drove down the hill and left his pickup behind a screen of junipers behind his trailer. A note was fastened to his screen door with a bent paper clip.

“Jim — The Captain says for you to report in right away.”

Chee repinned it to the door and went in. The light on his telephone answering machine was blinking. He sat, took off his boots, and punched the answering-machine button.

The voice was Cowboy Dashee’s:

“Hey, Jim. I filled the sheriff in on us finding Old Man Timms’s airplane. He called the feds, they got me on the phone, too. (Sound of Cowboy chuckling.) The agent quizzing me didn’t want to believe it was the same airplane, and I don’t blame him. I didn’t want to believe it either. Anyway, they sent somebody down there to make sure us indigenous people can tell an old L-17 from a zeppelin, and now the same old manhunt circus is getting organized just like in ‘98. If you want to save what’s left of your vacation, I’d recommend you keep a long way from your office.”

The next call was brief.

“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.“ Largo, who normally sounded grouchy, sounded even grouchier than usual.

The third call was his insurance dealer telling him he needed to add an uninsured motorists clause to his policy. The fourth and final one was Officer Bernadette Manuelito.

“Jim. I talked to Cowboy, and he told me what you did. And I want to thank you for that. But I was at the hospital in Farmington this morning, and they have Hosteen Nakai there. He’s very sick, and he told me he needs to see you. I’m going to come by your place. It’s ah, it’s almost six. I should be there by six-thirty or so.”

Chee spent a moment considering what Bernie had said. Then he erased calls one, three and four, leaving the Largo call (in case the captain needed to think he hadn’t heard it). Why would Nakai be in the hospital? It was hard to imagine that. He was dying of lung cancer, but he would never, never want to die in a hospital. Nakai was an ultra-traditional. A famous yataalii, a shaman who sang the Blessing Way, the Mountain Top Chant, the Night Way, and other curing ceremonials. As the older brother of Chee’s mother, he was Chee’s ‘little father,' the one who had given Chee his secret 'war name,' his mentor, the tutor who had tried to teach Chee to be a singer himself. Hosteen Nakai would hate being in a hospital. Dying in such a place would be intolerable for him. How could this have happened? Blue Woman was smart and tough. How could she have allowed anyone to take her husband from their place in the Chuska Mountains?

He was trying to think of an answer to that when he heard the sound of tires on gravel, looked up and saw through the screen door Bernie’s pickup rolling to a stop. Maybe she could tell him.

She couldn’t.

“I just happened to see him,” Bernie said. “They rolled him up on a gurney to where I was waiting for the elevator, and I thought he looked like your uncle, so I asked him if he was Hosteen Nakai, and he nodded, and I told him I worked with you, and he reached out for my arm and said to tell you to come, and I said I would, and then he said to tell you to come right away. And then the elevator came, and they put him on it.“ Bernie shook her head, her expression sad. “He looked bad.”

“That was all he said? Just for me to hurry and come?”

She nodded again. “I went back to the nursing station and asked. The nurse said they had put him in Intensive Care. She said it was lung cancer.”

“Yes,” Chee said. “Did she say how he got there?”

“She said an ambulance had brought him in. I guess his wife checked him in.“ She paused, looked at Chee, down at her hands and at him again. “The nurse said it was terminal. He had a tube in his arm and an oxygen thing.”

“It’s been terminal a long time,” Chee said. “Cancer. Another victim of the demon cigarette. Last time I saw him they thought he had just a few weeks to live and that was -" He stopped, thinking it had been months. Far too long. He felt shame for that—for violating the bedrock rule of the Navajo culture and putting his own interests ahead of family needs. Bernie was watching him, awaiting the end of his sentence. Looking slightly untidy as usual, and worried, and a little shy, wearing jeans stiff with newness and a bit too large for her and a shirt which fit the same description. A pretty girl, and nice, Chee thought, and found himself comparing her with Janet. Comparing pretty with beautiful, cute with classy, a sheep-camp woman with high society. He sighed. “That was far too long ago,” he concluded, and looked at his watch.

“They have evening visiting hours,” he said, and got up. “Maybe I can make it by then.”

“I wanted to tell you I talked to Cowboy Dashee,” Bernie said. “He told me what you did.”

“Did? You mean the airplane?”

“Yes,” she said, looking embarrassed. “That was a lot of work for you. You were sweet to do all that.”

“Oh,” Chee said. “Well. It was mostly luck.”

“I guess that was the big reason they were holding Teddy. Because he could fly. And he knew the man who had the plane. I owe you a big favor now. I didn’t really mean to ask you to do all that work. I just wanted you to tell me what to do.”

“I was going to ask why you were at the hospital. Seeing about Teddy Bai, I guess.”

“He’s better now,” she said. “They moved him out of Intensive Care.”

“I didn’t know Bai knew Eldon Timms,” Chee said. “Did you know that?”

“Janet Pete told me,” Bernie said. “She was at the hospital. She was appointed to represent Teddy.”

“Oh,” Chee said. Of course. Janet was a lawyer in the federal court public defender’s office. Bai was a Navajo. So was Janet, by her father’s name and her father’s blood if not by conditioning. Naturally, they’d give her Bai’s case.

Bernie was studying him. “She asked about you.”

“Oh?”

“I told her you were on vacation. Just back from going fishing up in Alaska.”

“Uh, what did she say to that?”

“She just sort of laughed. And she said she’d heard you had a hand in finding that airplane. Said she guessed you must have been doing that on your own time. I hadn’t talked to Cowboy yet, and I didn’t know about that, so I just said, well anyway you hadn’t gone back to work yet. And she laughed again, and said she thought getting egg on the FBI’s face had become sort of a hobby with you.”

Chee picked up his hat. “It’s not,” he said. “Lot of good people in the Bureau. It’s just they let the FBI get way too big. And the politicians get the promotions, and so they’re the ones making the policies and calling the shots instead of the bright ones. And so a lot of stupid things happen.”

“Like evacuating Bluff in that big manhunt of ninety-eight,” Bernie said.

Chee held the door open for her.

Bernie stood there looking at him, in no hurry to leave.

“Would you like to go along?” Chee asked. “Go see Hosteen Nakai with me?”

Bernie’s expression said she would.

“Could I help?”

“Maybe. Be good company anyway. And you could bring me up to date on what I’ve been missing here.”

But Bernie wasn’t very good company. As soon as she climbed into his pickup and shut the door behind her, he said, “You mentioned Janet asked about me at the hospital. What else did she say?”

Bernie looked at him a moment. “About you?”

“Yeah,” Chee said, wishing he hadn’t asked that question.

She thought for a moment, either about what Janet Pete had said about him, or about what she was willing to tell him.

“Just what I told you already, about you liking to embarrass the FBI,” she said.

After that there wasn’t much talking during the thirty-mile drive to the hospital.

Visiting hours were almost over when they pulled into the parking lot, and the traffic was mostly outgoing.

“I was noticing faces,” Bernie said. “The ones who had good news and the ones who didn’t. Not many of them looked happy.”

“Yeah,” Chee said, thinking of how he could apologize to Hosteen Nakai for neglecting him, trying to come up with the right words.

“Hospitals are always so sad,” Bernie said. “Except for the maternity ward.”

It took only a glance at the nurse manning the desk on the floor housing the Intensive Care ward to support Bernie’s observation. She was talking on a desk telephone, a graying, middle-aged woman whose face and voice reflected sorrow.

“Did he say when? OK." She glanced up at Chee and Bernie, gave the 'just a moment' signal, and said, "When he checks in tell him the Morris boy died." She hung up, made a wry face, and replaced it with a question.

“We’ve come to see Mr Frank Sam Nakai,” Chee said.

“He may not be awake,” she said, and glanced at the clock. “Visiting hours end at eight. You’ll have to make it brief.”

“He sent a message,” Chee said. “He asked me to come right away.”

“Let’s see then,” she said, and led them down the hall.

It was hard to tell whether Nakai was awake, or even alive. Much of his face was covered with a breathing mask, and he lay absolutely still.

“I think he’s sleeping,” Bernie said, and as she said it, Nakai’s eyes opened. He turned his face toward them and removed the mask.

“Long Thinker has come,” he said, in Navajo and in a voice almost too weak to be audible.

“Yes, Little Father,” Chee said. “I am here. I should have come long ago.”

A slender translucent tube connected Hosteen Nakai to a plastic container hung on a bedside stand. Nakai’s fingers followed the tube along the sheet to his arm. Not the burly arm Chee remembered. Not much more than a bone covered with dry skin.

“I will go away soon,” Nakai said. He spoke with his eyes closed, in slow, careful Navajo. “The in-standing wind will be leaving me, and I will follow it to another place." He tapped his forearm with a finger. “Nothing will be left here but these old bones then. Before that, I must tell something. There is something I left unfinished. I must give you the last of your lessons.”

“Lesson?” Chee asked, but instantly he knew what Nakai meant. Years ago, when Chee had still believed he could be both a Navajo Policeman and a hataalii, Nakai had been teaching him how to do the Night Way ceremony. Chee had memorized the actions of the Holy People involved in myth and how to reproduce this story in the sand paintings. He’d sung the chants that told the story. He’d learned the formula for the emetic required, how to handle the patient, everything required to produce the magic that would compel the Holy People to end the sickness and restore the harmony of natural life. Everything except the last lesson.

The tradition of Navajo shamanism required that. The teacher withheld the ultimate secret until he was certain the student was ready for it. For Chee, that moment had never come. Once he had gone away to Virginia to study at the FBI Academy, once he had flown to Los Angeles to work on a case, once he’d gone to Nakai’s winter hogan to be tutored and Nakai had said the season and the weather were wrong for it. Finally, Chee had concluded that Nakai had seen that he would never be ready to sing the Night Way. He had been hurt by that. He had suspected that Nakai disapproved of assimilation of the white man’s ways, of his plan to marry Janet Pete, had understood that having a Navajo father would never prepare her for the sacrifices required of a shaman’s wife. Whatever the reason, Chee had respected Nakai’s wisdom. He would have to forget that boyhood dream. He was not to be entrusted the power to cure. He had come to accept that.

But now—? Had Nakai changed his mind? What could he say?

“Here?” he said. He gestured at the white, sterile walls. “Could you do that here?”

“A bad place,” Nakai said. “Many people have died here, and many are sick and unhappy. I hear them crying in the hallway. And the chindi of the dead are trapped within its walls. I hear them, too. Even when they give me the medicine that makes me sleep, I hear them. What I must teach you should be done in a holy place, far away from evil. But we have no choice.”

He replaced the mask over his face, inhaled oxygen, and removed it again.

“The bilagaana do not understand death,” he said. “It is the other end of the circle, not something that should be fought and struggled against. Have you noticed that people die just at the end of night, when the stars are still shining in the west and you can sense the brightness of Dawn Boy on the eastern mountains? That’s so Holy Wind within them can go to bless the new day. I always thought I would die like that. In the summer. At our camp in the Chuskas. With the stars above me. With my instanding wind blowing free. Not dying trapped in-"

Nakai’s voice had become so faint that Chee couldn’t understand the last words. Then it faded into silence.

Chee felt Bernie’s touch at his elbow.

“Jim. If this is something ceremonial, shouldn’t I leave?”

“I guess so,” Chee said. “I really don’t know.”

They stood, watching Nakai, his eyes closed now.

Chee replaced the oxygen mask over his face, felt Bernie’s touch on his elbow.

“He hates this place,” Bernie said. “Let’s get him out of here.”

“What do you mean?” Chee said. “How?”

“We tell the nurse we’re taking him home. And then we take him home.”

“What about all that?” Chee asked, pointing at the oxygen mask, the tubes that tied Nakai to life, and the wires that linked him to the computers which measured the Holy Wind within him and reduced it to electronic blips racing across television screens. “He’ll die.”

“Of course he’ll die,” Bernie said, her tone impatient. “That’s what the nurse told us. He’s dying right now. That’s what he was telling you. But he doesn’t want to die here.”

“You’re right,” Chee said. “But how do -"

But Bernie was walking out. “First, I call the ambulance service,” she said. “While they’re coming I’ll start trying to check him out.”

It was not quite as simple as Bernie made it sound. The nurse was sympathetic but had questions to be answered. For example, where was Nakai’s wife, whose name, but not her signature, was on the admissions form? By what authority were they taking Mr Nakai off the life-support systems and out of the hospital? The doctor who had admitted Mr Nakai had left for Albuquerque. That shifted responsibility to another doctor—now busy in the emergency room downstairs patching up a knifing victim. He arrived on the floor thirty minutes and two paging calls later, looking young and tired.

“What’s this about?” he asked, and the nurse provided a fill-in that caused him to look doubtful. Meanwhile, the ambulance attendant emerged from the elevator, recognized Chee from working traffic accidents and asked him for instructions.

“I can’t do it,” the doctor said. “The patient’s on life support. We need authorization from the next of kin. Lacking that, the admitting physician needs to sign him out.”

“That’s not really the question,” Chee said. “We are taking Hosteen Nakai home tonight to be with his wife. Our question is how you can help us do this to minimize the trouble it might cause.”

That produced a chilly but brief silence followed by the signing by Chee of a Released Against Advice of Physician form and a financial responsibility statement. Then Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai was free again.

Chee rode in the back of the ambulance with Nakai and the emergency medical technician.

“I guess you heard they got one of those casino bandits,” the tech said. “It was on the six o’clock news.”

“No,” Chee said. “What happened?”

“The guy shot himself,” the tech said. “It was that fella that used to have a radio talk show. Sort of a right’winger. News said he ran cattle up there south of Aneth. Married a Navajo woman and was using her grazing allotment up there.”

“Shot himself? What’d they say about that?”

“Not much. It was at his house. I guess they were closing in on him, and he didn’t want to get arrested. Fella named Everett Jorie. And now they know who the other two were. Said they’re both from up there in Utah. Part of one of those militia bunches.”

“Jorie,” Chee said. “Never heard of him.”

“He used to have a talk show on the radio. You know, all the nuts calling in and complaining about the government.”

“OK. I remember him now.”

“And they have the other two identified now. Man named George Ironhand and one named Buddy Baker. I think Ironhand’s a Ute. Anyway, they said he used to work at the Ute Casino.”

“I wonder how they got them identified.”

“The TV said the FBI did it, but it didn’t say how.”

“Well, hell,” Chee said. “I was hoping they’d catch them in Los Angeles, or Tulsa, or Miami, or anyplace a long ways from this place.”

The ambulance tech chuckled. “You’re not anxious to go prowling around in those canyons again. I wouldn’t be, either.”

Chee let that pass into silence.

Then Hosteen Nakai sighed, and said, “Ironhand.” And sighed again.

Chee leaned over him, and said, “Little Father. Are you all right?”

“Ironhand,” Nakai said. “Be careful of him. He was a witch.”

“A witch? What did he do?”

But Hosteen Nakai seemed to be sleeping again.

Chapter Eleven

The half-moon was dipping behind the mountains to the west when the ambulance, with Bernie trailing it in Chee’s truck, rolled down the track and stopped outside Hosteen Nakai’s sheep-camp place in the Chuskas. Blue Woman was standing in the doorway waiting. She ran out to greet them, crying. At first the tears were for grief, thinking they were bringing home her husband’s body. Then she cried for joy.

They put him on his bed beside a pinion tree, rearranged his oxygen supply and listened to Blue Woman’s tearful explanation of how Hosteen Nakai had come to be abandoned, as she saw it, in the Farmington hospital. Her niece had come to take her to have an infected tooth removed, and to replenish the supply of the medicine which kept away the pain and let her husband sleep. Nakai had been much better, had wanted to come along and there had been no one to look after him at the sheep camp. But at the dentist’s office he had fainted, someone called 911, and an ambulance took him to the hospital. She had waited there, and waited, not knowing what to do for him, and finally her niece had to go to care for her children, and she had to go with her. There were stories that the rich young people from the cities were putting wolves back in the mountains, and there was no one at their place to protect their young lambs.

Nakai was awake now, listening to all this. When Blue Woman was finished, he motioned to Chee.

“I have something to tell you,” he said. “A story.”

“We will make some coffee,” Blue Woman said. She led Bernie away to the hogan, and as they left Nakai began his tale.

It would be long, Chee thought, involving the intricacies of Navajo theology, the relationship of the universal creator who set all nature in its harmonious motion to the spirit world of the Holy People, and to humanity, and when it was finished he would know the final secret that would qualify him as a shaman.

“I think you will be going into the canyon soon to hunt the men who killed the policemen,” Nakai said. “I must tell you a story about Ironhand. I think you must be very, very careful.”

Chee exhaled a long breath. Wrong again, he thought.

“A long time ago when I was a boy, and the winter stories were being told in the hogan, and people were talking about the great dam that was going to make Lake Powell, and how the water of the Colorado and the San Juan were backing up and drowning the canyons, the old men would talk about how the Utes and the Paiutes would come through the canyons in their secret ways, and steal the sheep and horses of our people, and kill them, too. And the worst of these was a Paiute they called Dobby, and the band that followed him. And the worst of the Utes was a man they called Ironhand.”

Nakai replaced his oxygen mask and spent a few moments inhaling.

“Ironhand,” Chee said, probably too softly for Nakai to hear him.

Nakai removed the mask again.

“They say Dobby and his people came out of the canyons at night and stole the sheep and horses at the place of woman of the tl’igu dinee, and they killed her and her daughter and two children. And the son-in-law of this old woman was a man they called Littleman, who married into the Salt Clan but was born to the Near the Water Dine’. And they say he forgot the Navajo Way and went crazy with his grief.”

Nakai’s voice grew weaker, and slower, as he related how Littleman, after years spent hunting and watching, had finally found the narrow trail the raiders had used and finally killed Dobby and his men.

“It took summer after summer for many years for the Salt Clan to catch Dobby,” Nakai said. “But no one ever caught the Ute they called Ironhand.”

The moon was down, the dark sky overhead adazzle with stars, and Chee was feeling the high-altitude chill. He leaned forward in his chair and tucked the blankets around Nakai’s shoulders.

“Little Father,” he said, "I think you should sleep now. Do you need more of the medicine for that?”

“I need you to listen,” Nakai said. “Because while our people never caught Ironhand, we know now why we didn’t. And we know he had a son and a daughter, and I think he must have a son or a grandson. And I think that is who you will be hunting, and what I will tell you will help.”

Chee had to lean forward now, his ear close to Nakai’s lips, to hear the rest of it. After two of his raids, the Navajos had managed to trace Ironhand and his men into the Gothic Creek Canyon, and then down Gothic toward the San Juan under the rim of Casa Del Eco Mesa. There tracks turned into a steep, narrow side canyon where the Utes and Mormon settlers from Bluff dug coal. They found a corpse in one of the coal mines. But the canyon was a dead end with no way out. It was as if Ironhand and his men were witches who could fly over the cliffs.

Nakai’s voice died away. He replaced the mask, inhaled, and removed it again.

“I think if there is a young man named Ironhand, he robs and kills people, he would know where his grandfather hid in that canyon, and how he escaped from it.

“And now,” Hosteen Nakai said, "before I sleep, I must teach you the last lesson so you can be a hataalii." He took a labored breath. “Or not be one.”

To Chee, the old man seemed utterly exhausted. “First, Father, I think you should rest and restore yourself. You should -"

“I must do it now,” Nakai said. “And you must listen. The last lesson is the one that matters. Will you hear me?”

Chee took the old man’s hand.

“Know that it is hard for the people to trust outside their own family. Even harder when they are sick. They have pain. They are out of harmony. They see no beauty anywhere. All their connections are broken. That is who you are talking to. You tell them the Power that made us made all this above us and around us and we are part of the Power and if we do as we are taught we can bring ourselves back into hozho. Back into harmony. Then they will again know beauty all around them.”

Nakai closed his eyes, gripped Chee’s hand.

“That is hard to believe,” he said. “Do you understand that?”

“Yes.”

“To be restored, they must believe you.”

Nakai opened his eyes, stared at Chee.

“Yes,” Chee said.

“You know the chants. You sing them without a mistake. And your sand paintings are exactly right. You know the herbs, how to make the emetics, all that.”

“I hope so,” Chee said, understanding now what Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai was telling him.

“But you have to decide if you have gone too far beyond the four Sacred Mountains. Sometimes you can never come all the way back into Dinetah again.”

Chee nodded. He remembered a Saturday night after he’d graduated from high school. Nakai had driven him to Gallup. They had parked on Railroad Avenue and sat for two hours watching the drunks wandering in and out of the bars.

He’d asked Nakai why he’d parked there, who they were looking for. Nakai hadn’t answered at first, but what he said when he finally spoke Chee had never forgotten.

“We are looking for the dine’ who have left Dinetah. Their bodies are here, but their spirits are far beyond the Sacred Mountains. You can go east of Mount Taylor to find them, or west of the San Francisco Peaks, or you can find them here.”

Chee had pointed to a man who had been leaning clumsily against the wall up the avenue from them, and who now was sitting, head down on the sidewalk. “Like him?” he asked.

Nakai had waved his hand in a motion that included the bar’s neon Coors sign and the drunk now trying to push himself up from the pavement. But went beyond them to follow a polished white Lincoln Town Car rolling up the avenue toward them.

“Which one acts like he has no relatives?” Nakai had asked him. “The drunk who leaves his children hungry, or the man who buys that car that boasts of his riches instead of helping his brother?”

Nakai’s eyes were closed now, and his efforts to breathe produced a faint groaning sound. Then he said, “To cure them you must make them believe. You must believe so strongly that they feel it. Do you understand?”

“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.

Chapter Twelve

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.

“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.”

Chapter Thirteen

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.

“No signature,” Chee said.

“It was left on Jorie’s computer screen,” Leaphorn said. “This is a printout.”

Yes, Chee could imagine Leaphorn doing that. Did the FBI know he’d done it? Highly unlikely. He read through it.

“Wow,” Chee said. “This requires some new thinking." He glanced at Professor Bourebonette, who was watching him. Checking his reaction, Chee guessed. She’d read the note, too. Well, why shouldn’t she?

“Some things are puzzling,” Leaphorn said. “From what Dashee found - just two sets of footprints - Jorie seems to have gotten away from the two somewhere else. Near enough to his home to walk there? But if you look at the map, you see their escape route wouldn’t take them there. It would be out of the way. He says in his note they were planning to kill him. That he slipped away. That suggests they stopped somewhere else. But where? And why?”

“Good questions,” Chee said.

“I tried to re-create the situation from what little I knew,” Leaphorn said. “Jorie, a sort of intellectual. Political idealogue. Fanatic. Doing a robbery to finance his cause. Then it goes sour on him. Unplanned killings. At least unplanned by him. Awareness that his recruits are going to take the loot. There must have been an argument. Or at least an angry quarrel. It must have occurred to Jorie that letting him split off represented a threat to them. How did he manage it?”

“No idea,” Chee said.

“Let’s say he was still with them when they left the truck. Do you think Dashee might have missed his tracks?”

“They’d stopped in a big flatfish place. Mostly covered with old blow dirt. Dashee’s good at his job, and it would be hard to miss fresh track in that.”

“How about cover? A place to hide?”

“No,” Chee said. “A cluster of junipers sort of screened the truck itself from the road. But I didn’t see a good place to hide anywhere near. There wasn’t one. Certainly not if they were looking for him.”

“I presume he was armed,” Leaphorn said. “Maybe he warned them away. You know: 'I’m out of here. Let me go or I’m shooting you.'”

“Could have been that,” Chee said.

The waitress returned. Leaphorn moved the map to make space for the plates. He looked at Chee. “You had something you wanted to tell me.”

“Uh, oh, yeah, I did. About Ironhand. How much do you know about him?”

“Very little.”

Chee waited, hoping he’d add to that. From what Dashee had told him Leaphorn knew enough about George Ironhand to have him on the list of names he asked Potts about. But Leaphorn obviously wasn’t going to explain that.

“They say a Ute by that same name, about ninety or so years ago, used to lead a little band of raiders down across the San Juan into our territory. Steal horses, sheep, whatever they could find, kill people, so forth. The Navajos would chase them, but they’d disappear in that rough country along the Nokaito Bench. Maybe into Chinle Wash or Gothic Creek. It started a legend that Ironhand was some sort of Ute witch. He could fly. Our people would see him down in the canyon bottom, and then they’d see him up on the rimrock, with no way to get there. Or sometimes the other way around. Top to bottom. Anyway, Ironhand was never caught.”

Leaphorn took a small bite of the hamburger steak he’d ordered, and looked thoughtful.

“Louisa,” he said, "have you ever picked up anything like that in your legend collecting?”

“I’ve read something sort of similar,” Professor Bourebonette said. “A man they called Dobby used to raid across the San Juan about the same time. But that was farther west. Down into the Monument Valley area. I think that’s more or less on the record. A Navajo named Littleman finally ambushed them in the San Juan Canyon. The way the story goes, he killed Dobby and two of the others. But they were Paiutes, and that happened earlier—in the eighteen nineties, I think it was.”

Leaphorn nodded. “I’ve heard the old folks in my family talk about that. Littleman was Red Forehead Dine‘, in my mother’s clan.”

“It produced a sort of witch story, too,” Louisa said. “Dobby could make his men invisible.”

Leaphorn put down his fork. “That old Ute you’re interviewing at Towaoc tomorrow. Why not see what she remembers about the legendary Ironhand?”

“Why not,” Professor Bourebonette said. “It’s right down my scholarly alley. And the man you’re after is probably Ironhand Junior. Or Ironhand the Second or Third.”

She smiled at Chee. “Nothing changes. A century later and you have the same problem in the same canyons.”

Chee nodded and returned the smile, but he was thinking there was one big difference. In the 1890s, or 1910s, or whenever it was, the local posse didn’t have the FBI city boys telling them how to run their hunt.

Chapter Fourteen

From where Joe Leaphorn sat, he could see the odd shape of Sleeping Ute Mountain out one window, and the Ute Casino about a mile down the slope out of another. If he looked straight ahead, he could watch Louisa and Conrad Becenti, her interpreter. They sat at a card table putting a new tape in their recording machine. Beyond them, on a sofa of bright blue plastic against the wall, sat an immensely old and frail-looking Ute woman named Bashe Lady, her plump and middle-aged granddaughter and a girl about twelve who Leaphorn presumed was a great-granddaughter. Leaphorn himself was perched upon a straight-backed kitchen chair, perched far too long with no end in sight.

Only Bashe Lady and Louisa seemed to be enjoying this session—the old woman obviously glorying in the attention, and Louisa in the role of myth hunter happy with what she was collecting. Leaphorn was fighting off sleep, and the occupants of the sofa had the look of those who had heard all this before, and far too often.

They’d been hearing that Bashe Lady had been born into the Mogche band of the Southern Utes but had married into the Kapot band. With that out of the way, she had used the next hour or so enthusiastically giving Louisa the origin story of both bands. Leaphorn had been interested for thirty minutes or so, but mostly in Professor Bourebonette’s technical skills—the questions she chose to direct the interview and the way she made sure she understood what Becenti was telling her. Becenti was part-Ute, part-Navajo and probably part something else. He had studied mythology with Louisa at Northern Arizona and seemed to still maintain that awe-stricken student-to-teacher attitude.

Leaphorn squirmed into a slightly less uncomfortable position. He watched a truck towing a multi-sized horse trailer pulling into the Ute Casino parking lot, watched its human occupants climb out and head for the gaming tables, noticed a long column of vehicles creeping south on U.S. 666, the cork in this traffic bottle being an overloaded flatbed hauling what seemed to be a well-drilling rig. He found himself wondering if the campaign by Biblical fundamentalists to have the highway number changed from ‘the mark of the Beast’ to something less terrible (turning the signs upside down to make it 999 had been suggested) had any effect on patronage of the casino. Probably not. He shifted from that to trying to decide how the casino management dealt with the problem of chips that surely must have been snatched from roulette tables when the lights went off during the robbery. Probably they had borrowed a different set from another casino. But the discomfort inflicted by the wooden chair seat drove that thought away. He shifted into getting-up position and reached for his empty glass—intending to sneak into the kitchen with it without being rude.

No such luck. The great-granddaughter had been watching him, and apparently watching for her own excuse to escape. She leaped to her feet and confronted him.

“I’ll get you some more iced tea,” she said, snatched the glass and was gone.

Leaphorn settled himself again, and as he did, the interview got interesting.

“… and then she said that in those days when the Bloody Knives were coming in all the time and stealing everything and killing people, the Mogches had a young man named Ouraynad, but people called him Ironhand, or sometimes The Badger. And he was very good at killing the Bloody Knives. He would lead our young men down across the San Juan and they would steal back the cattle the Bloody Knives had stolen from us.”

“OK, Conrad,” Louisa said. “Ask her if Ouraynad was related to Ouray?”

Becenti asked. Bashe Lady responded with a discourse incomprehensible to Leaphorn, except for references to Bloody Knives, which was the Ute nickname for the hated Navajos. Leaphorn hadn’t been bothered by that at first. After all, the Navajo curing ceremonial used the Utes to symbolize enemies of the people and the Hopi phrase for Navajos meant ‘head breakers,” with the implication his forefathers killed people with rocks. But now Leaphorn had been hearing the translator rattle off uncomplimentary remarks about the dine’ for about two hours. He was beginning to resent it.

Bashe Lady stopped talking, gave Leaphorn an inscrutable look, and threw out her hands.

“A lot of stuff about the heroism and bravery of the Great Chief Ouray,” Becenti said, ”but nothing that’s not already published. Bottom line was she thought this Ironhand was related to Ouray in some way, but she wasn’t sure.”

Leaphorn leaned forward and interrupted. “Could you ask her if this Ironhand had any descendants with the same name?”

Becenti looked at Louisa. Louisa looked at Leaphorn, frowning. “Later,” she said. “I don’t want to break up her line of thought.” And to Becenti: "Ask her if this hero Ironhand had any magical powers. Was he a witch? Anything mystical?”

Becenti asked, with Bashe Lady grinning at him.

The grin turned into a cackling laugh, which turned into a discourse, punctuated by more laughter and hand gestures.

“She says they heard the Navajos [Becenti had stopped translating that into Bloody Knives in deference to Leaphorn sitting behind him] were fooled so often by Ironhand that they began believing he was like one of their witches — like a Skinwalker who could change himself into an owl and fly, or a dog and run under the bushes. She said they would hear stories the Navajos told about how he could jump from the bottom of the canyon up to the rim, and then jump down again. But she said the Mogche people knew he was just a man. Just a lot smarter than the Navajos who hunted him. About then they started calling him Badger. Because of the way he fooled the Navajos.”

Leaphorn leaned forward, into the silence which followed that, and began: "Ask her if this guy had a son.”

Louisa looked over her shoulder at him, and said, “Patience. We’ll get to that.” But then she shrugged and turned back to Becenti.

“Ask her if Ironhand had any children?”

He had several, both sons and daughters, Bashe Lady said. Two wives, one a Kapot Ute and the other a Paiute woman. While Becenti was translating that, she burst into enthusiastic discourse again, with more laughter and gestures. Becenti listened, and translated.

“She said he took this Paiute woman when he was old, after his first wife died, and she was the daughter of a Paiute they called Dobby. And Dobby was like Ironhand himself. He killed many Navajos, and they couldn’t catch him either. And Ironhand, even when he was an old, old man, had a son by this Paiute woman, and this son became a hero, too.”

Louisa glanced back at Leaphorn, looked at Becenti, said, “Ask her what he did to become a hero.”

Bashe Lady talked. Becenti listened, inserted a brief question, listened again.

“He was in the war. He was one of the soldiers who wore the green hats. She said he shot a lot of men and got shot twice himself, and they gave him medals and ribbons,” Becenti said. “I asked which war. She said she didn’t know, but he came home about when they were drilling the new oil wells in the Aneth field. So it must have been Vietnam.”

During all this, Great-Granddaughter emerged from the kitchen and handed Leaphorn his renewed glass of iced tea — devoid now of ice cubes. What Bashe Lady had been saying had brought Granddaughter out of lethargy. She listened intently to Becenti’s translation, leaned forward. “He was in the army,” she said. “In the Special Services, and they put him on the Cambodian border with the hill tribes. The Montegnards. And then they sent him over into Cambodia.” She laughed. “He said he wasn’t supposed to talk about that.”

She paused, looking embarrassed by her interruption. Leaphorn took advantage of the silence. Granddaughter obviously knew a lot about this younger version of Ironhand. He put aside his manners and interjected himself into the program.

“What did he do in the army? Was he some sort of specialist?”

“He was a sniper,” she told Leaphorn. “They gave him the Silver Star decoration for shooting fifty-three of the enemy soldiers, and then he was shot, so he got the Purple Heart, too.”

“Fifty-three,” Leaphorn said, thinking this had to be George Ironhand of the casino robbery, thinking he would hate to be prowling the canyons looking for him.

“Do you know where he lives?”

Granddaughter’s expression suggested she didn’t like this question. She studied Leaphorn, shook her head.

Becenti glanced back at him, said something to Bashe Lady. She responded with a few words and a couple of hand gestures. In brief she said Ironhand raised cattle at a place north of Montezuma Creek - approximately the same location Leaphorn had been given by Potts and had seen in Jorie’s suicide note.

Leaphorn interrupted again.

“Louisa, could you ask her if anyone knows how the first Ironhand got away from the Navajos?”

Becenti was getting caught up in this, too. He didn’t wait for approval. He asked. Bashe Lady laughed, answered, and laughed again. Becenti shrugged.

“She said the Navajos thought he got away like a bird, but he got away like a badger.”

About then Granddaughter said something in rapid Ute to Bashe Lady, and Bashe Lady looked angry, and then abashed, and decided she knew absolutely nothing more about Ironhand.

When the interview was over and they were heading back toward Shiprock, Louisa wanted to talk about Ironhand Junior, as she had begun calling him. The session had gone well, she said. A lot of it was what had already been collected about Ute mythology, religion and customs. But some of it, as she put it, “cast some light on how the myths of preliterate cultures evolve with generational changes.” And the information about Ironhand was interesting.

Having said that, she glanced at Leaphorn and caught him grinning.

“What?” she said, sounding suspicious.

The grin evolved into a chuckle. “No offense, but when you talk like that it takes me right back to Tempe, Arizona, and sleepy afternoons in the poorly air-conditioned classrooms of Arizona State, and the voices of my professors of anthropology.”

“Well,” she said, ”that’s what I am." But she laughed, too. “I guess it gets to be a habit. And it’s getting even worse. Postmodernism is in the saddle now, with its own jargon. Anyway, Bashe Lady was a good source. If nothing else, it shows that hostility toward you Bloody Knives still lingers on like Serb versus Croat.”

“Except these days we’re far too civilized to be killing one another. We marry back and forth, buy each other’s used cars, and the only time we invade them it’s to try to beat their slot machines.”

“OK, I surrender.”

But Leaphorn was still a bit chafed from a long day listening to his people described as brutal invaders. “And as you know very well, Professor, the Utes were the aggressors. They’re Shoshoneans. Warriors off the Great Plains moving in on us peaceful Athabascan farmers and shepherds.”

“Peaceful shepherds who stole their sheep from who?” Louisa said. “Or is it whom? Anyway, I’m trying to calculate the chronology of this second Ironhand. Wouldn’t he be too old now to be the bandit everyone is looking for?”

“Maybe not,” Leaphorn said. “The first one would have been operating as late as 1910, which is when we started getting some fairly serious law and order out here. She said the current Ironhand was a child of his old age. Let’s say Junior was born in the early forties. That’s biologically possible, and that would have him the right age to be in the Vietnam War.”

“I guess so. From what she said about him, if I was one of those guys out there trying to find him, I’d be hoping that I wouldn’t.”

Leaphorn nodded. He wondered how much the FBI knew about Ironhand. And if they did know, how much they had passed along to the locals. He thought about what Bashe Lady had said about how the original Ironhand had eluded the Navajos hunting him. Not like a bird, but like a badger. Badgers escaped when they didn’t just stand and fight by diving into their tunnel. Badger tunnels had an exit as well as an entrance. When the hunting ground was canyon country and coal-mining country, that was an interesting thought.

Chapter Fifteen

On the maps drawn by geographers it’s labeled the Colorado Plateau, with its eighty-five million acres sprawling across Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. It is larger than any of those states; mostly high and dry and cut by countless canyons eroded eons ago when the glaciers were melting and the rain didn’t stop for many thousand years. The few people who live on it call it the Four Corners, the High Dry, Canyon Land, Slick Rock Country, the Big Empty. Once a writer in more poetic times called it the Land of Room Enough and Time.

This hot afternoon, Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police had other names for it, all uncomplimentary and some, after he’d slid into a growth of thistles, downright obscene. He’d spent the day with Officer Jackson Nez, prowling cautiously along the bottom of one of those canyons, perspiring profusely under FBI-issued body armor, carrying an electronic satellite location finder and an infrared body-heat-detecting device and a scoped rifle. What weighed Chee down even more than all that was the confident knowledge that he and Officer Nez were wasting their time.

“It’s not a total waste of time,” Officer Nez said, ”because when the federals can mark off enough of these canyons as searched, they can declare those guys dead and call this off.”

“Don’t count on it,” Chee said.

“Or the perps see us coming and shoot us, and the feds watch for the buzzards, and when they find our bodies, they get their forensic teams in here, and do the match to decide where the shots came from, and then they find the bad guys.”

“That makes me feel a little better,” Chee said. “Nice to be working with an optimist.”

Nez was sitting on a shaded sandstone slab with his body armor serving as a seat cushion while he was saying this. He was grinning, enjoying his own humor. Chee was standing on the sandy bottom of Gothic Creek, body armor on, tinkering with the location finder. Here, away from the cliffs, it was supposed to be in direct contact with the satellite and its exact longitude/latitude numbers would appear on its tiny screen.

Sometimes, including now, they did. Chee pushed the send switch, read the numbers into the built-in mike, shut the gadget off and looked at his watch.

“Let’s go home,” he said. “Unless you enjoy piling on a lot more overtime.”

“I could use the money,” Nez said.

Chee laughed. “Maybe they’ll add it to your retirement check. We’re still trying to collect our overtime for the Great Canyon Climbing Marathon of ‘98. Let’s get out of here before it gets dark.”

They managed that, but by the time Chee reached Bluff and his room at the Recapture Lodge, the stars were out. He was tired and dirty. He took off his boots, socks, shirt and trousers, flopped onto the bed, and unwrapped the ham-and-cheese sandwich he’d bought at the filling station across the highway. He’d rest a little, he’d take a shower, he’d hit the sack and sleep, sleep, sleep. He would not think about this manhunt, nor about Janet Pete, nor about anything else. He wouldn’t think about Bernie Manuelito, either. He would set the alarm clock for 6 A.M. and sleep. He took a bite of the sandwich. Delicious. He had another sandwich in the sack. Should have bought a couple more for breakfast. He finished chewing, swallowed, yawned hugely, prepared for a second bite.

From the door the sound: tap, tap, tap, tap.

Chee lay still, sandwich raised, staring at the door. Maybe a mistake, he thought. Maybe they will go away.

Tap, tap, tap, followed by: "Jim. You home?”

The voice of the Legendary Lieutenant.

Chee rewrapped the sandwich, put it on the bedside table, sighed, limped over and opened the door.

Leaphorn stood there, looking apologetic, and beside him was the Woman Professor. She was smiling at him.

“Oops,” Chee said, stepping out of her line of vision and reaching for his pants. “Sorry. Let me get some clothes on.”

While he was doing that, Leaphorn was apologizing, saying they’d only be a minute. Chee waved them toward the room’s two chairs, and sat on the bed.

“You look exhausted,” the professor said. “The policewoman at your roadblock said you’d probably been searching in one of the canyons all day. But Joe learned something he felt you needed to know." She gave Chee a wry smile. “I told him you probably already knew it.”

“Better safe than sorry,” Chee said, and looked at Leaphorn, who was sitting uneasily on the edge of his chair.

“Just a couple of things about this George Ironhand,” Leaphorn said. “I guess you knew he was a Vietnam veteran, but we heard today he was a Green Beret. Heard he was a sniper, won a Silver Star. Supposed to have shot fifty-three North Viet soldiers over in Cambodia.”

Leaphorn stopped.

Chee thought about that for a moment.

“Fifty-three,” he said finally. “I appreciate your telling me. I think if the FBI had let us in on that little secret, Officer Nez would have kept his body armor on in the canyon.”

“I imagine the FBI would know this man was a veteran,” Leaphorn said. “They’re pretty thorough in checking records. But they might not know about the rest of it. To know that, they’d have to turn up the business about him getting decorated.”

“Or pass it along if they did,” Chee said, his voice now sounding more angry than tired. “We might leak it to the press; the feds wouldn’t want the public to know we’re chasing a certified official war hero.”

“Well,” Leaphorn said, "they probably didn’t pick up the sniper bit. Army records would just show he received the decoration for something general. Risking his life beyond the call of duty. Something like that.”

“OK,” Chee said. “I guess I wasn’t being fair.”

“At least, though,” said the professor, "I’d think they should have told you he was a combat veteran.”

“Me, too,” Chee said. “But I guess nobody’s perfect. I know we weren’t today. All we got was a lot of exercise.”

“No tracks?”

Chee waved his hands.

“Lots of tracks. Coyotes, goats, rabbits, lizards, snakes, variety of birds every place there was a seep,” Chee said. “But no sign of humans. We even picked up what might have been puma tracks. Either that or an oversize big-footed bobcat. One sign of porcupine, rodents galore, from kangaroo rats, to deer mice, to prairie dogs.”

“Could you rule out humans?”

“Not really,” Chee said. “Too much slick rock. We didn’t find a single place in maybe five miles we covered where anybody careful couldn’t find rocks to walk on.”

“So the hunt goes nowhere,” Leaphorn said. “I guess until someone comes up with a better reason for leaving that escape vehicle where it was left.”

“You mean better than running down into Gothic Creek to hide?” Chee laughed. “Well, I guess that was better than the first idea. Thinking they trotted over to the Timms place to fly away in that old airplane of his." Chee paused. “Wait a minute. You said you had two things to tell me, Lieutenant. What’s the second one. Do you have a better idea?”

Leaphorn looked a bit embarrassed, shook his head.

“Not really,” he said. “Just more stuff about George Ironhand. Maybe it might mean something." He glanced at Louisa. “Where do I start?”

“At the beginning,” Louisa said. “First tell him about the original Ironhand.”

So he recounted the deeds of the legendary Ute hero/bandit, the futile efforts of the Navajos to hunt him down, describing Bashe Lady’s account of how those hunting him thought he might be a witch because he seemed able to disappear from a canyon bottom and reappear magically on its rim.

“She said the Navajos thought he escaped like a bird, but actually he escaped like a badger." Leaphorn paused with that, watching for Chee’s reaction.

Chee was rubbing his chin, thinking.

“Like a badger,” Chee said. “Or a prairie dog. In one hole and out another. Did she give you any hint of where this was happening? Name a canyon, anything like that?”

“None,” Leaphorn said.

“Do you think she knows?”

“Probably. At very least, I think she has a pretty good general idea. She knew a lot more than she was willing to tell us about that.”

Professor Bourebonette was smiling. “She didn’t show any signs of affection for you Navajos. You 'Bloody Knives.' I think that after about four hours of that, she was getting under Joe’s skin a little. Right, Joe? Arousing your competitive, nationalistic macho instincts, maybe?”

Leaphorn produced a reluctant chuckle. “OK,” he said. “I plead guilty. I was imagining Bashe Lady in one of those John-Wayne-type movies. Tepees everywhere, paint ponies standing around, dogs, cooking fires, young guys with Italian faces and Cheyenne war paint running around yipping and thumping drums, and there’s Bashe Lady with a bloody knife in her hand torturing some tied-up prisoners. And I’m thinking of how it actually was in 1863, when these Utes teamed up with the U.S. Army, and the Hispanos and the Pueblo tribes and came howling down on us and -"

Professor Bourebonette held up her hand.

Leaphorn cut that off, made a wry face and a dismissing gesture. “Sorry,” he said. “The old lady got on my nerves. And I’ll have to admit I’d love to see the Navajo Tribal Police catch this new version of Ironhand and lock him up.”

“The point of all this is that the George Ironhand you’re looking for is probably the son of the original version,” Professor Bourebonette said. “The first one took a new wife when he was old. The right time span for this guy. Right age to be in the Vietnam War.”

Chee nodded. “So the man we’re looking for would likely know how his daddy did the badger escape trick. And where he did it.” He looked at Leaphorn. “Do you have any ideas about that?”

“Well, I was going to ask you if you had found any mine shafts down in Gothic Creek Canyon.”

“We saw several little coal digs. What they call dog holes. None of them went in more than a few yards. Just people digging out a few sacks to get them through the winter. That creek cuts through coal seams in a lot of places, some of them pretty thick. But we didn’t see anything that looked like commercial mining.”

“Maybe Ironhand has himself a hidden route up some narrow side gulch,” Leaphorn said. “From the way the old woman told the story there just had to be a quick way to get up and down the canyon wall. Did you see any little narrow cuts like that? Maybe even a crack a man could climb?”

“Not in the section we covered,” Chee said. “Maybe we’ll find one farther down toward the San Juan Canyon.”

“If they had a secret hidey-hole, I think you’d find it not too far from where they left the truck. They’d be carrying a lot. Food and water probably, unless they stocked up in advance. And four hundred and something thousand dollars. From that casino it would be mostly in small bills. That would be a lot of weight. And then weapons. They apparently used assault rifles at the casino. They’re heavy.”

That triggered another thought in Chee—a worry that had been nagging for attention.

“You mentioned a roadblock on your way in from the Ute Reservation. An NTP block, I think you said. Talking to a policewoman.”

“It was one of our patrol cars, but the man sitting in it was wearing a San Juan County deputy uniform. The woman was wearing a Navajo Police uniform. Up here it would probably be one of your people out of Shiprock.”