Hunting Badger
( Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee - 14 )
Tony Hillerman
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 kno
b. 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.
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