Hunting Badger jlajc-14

by Tony Hillerman

  “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 d
inner.

  “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?”