The solid doors blocked Del Rio’s view so he could only perversely hope Cardosa might have landed on the asphalt. Howard turned from the door with an air of great satisfaction, pausing in his return to his station only long enough to collect Del Rio’s dinner and return it to him.
“Your dinner, sir?” Howard said with a slight air of disapproval.
“Such as it is,” Del Rio replied. “My compliments on the quality of this hotel’s service.”
“We aim to provide the best for our guests, sir.”
“Indeed. Good night, Mr. Howard.”
“Good night, sir.”
Del Rio turned to head for his room, surprised by the flash of disappointment he felt as he looked up and did not see Chee standing on the second floor landing above. Too tired to try to work out what had prompted that response, he strode down the dark hallway only to find Chee standing in front of his door waiting for him.
“Jack,” she said, quickly placing a hand on each of Del Rio’s shoulders. “That was absolutely incredible. Thank you.”
With that she leaned forward and quickly kissed his cheek. Just as quickly she stepped back and dropped her hands away, her eyes wide as if she was as surprised by what she’d just done as he was. They stood there in the hallway for a moment that seemed to last an hour without a word being said. Then she turned and moved down the hall, not quite running back to her room. As he watched her leave, Del Rio raised a hand to his cheek, surprised by how warm it felt.
For her part, Chee was just as confused by what she had just done and even more so by the strong urge that she’d momentarily had in that hallway to do more than just kiss him on the cheek. She’d had a feeling that if she hadn’t quickly withdrawn from his door, she would have followed up on that sudden urge.
The feeling was both confusing and exciting. She had never felt this way before about a man — especially one she had only known for such a short time. More than once she had caught herself wondering what lay underneath that black and white exterior of clothing that he wore almost like a shield. He had an uncanny knack of looking at her about the same time that she had those thoughts, and she was glad that her natural coloring covered any blushing.
She could usually read someone without much effort; he was proving very difficult to figure out. The enigma that was Jack Del Rio only made him that much more desirable, and that was a problem. Neither one of them needed the distraction of a romantic entanglement right now. After the case was closed, perhaps she could pursue something, not until then. So she firmly resolved to put any further such thoughts out of her mind. Theirs was to be a purely professional relationship, and that was that.
Still, it was a very long time after she had turned off the lights in her room and slipped into bed before she stopped thinking about her new partner, both before and after sleep finally claimed her.
EIGHTEEN
Del Rio’s last thought before falling asleep, and his first upon awakening the next morning, was also about his temporary partner. Trying to sort out what had motivated that kiss, as well as his unexpected response to it, had not been an easy task for an already over-tired brain. Deciding what, if anything, he should do about it was even more so.
The problem was that he’d had the dream again, the one he’d had all of those nights before drawing this assignment, and it had been an almost exact replay. The doomed woman’s voice now seemed to be a closer match to Chee’s slightly deeper tone, but he’d seen a little more of the woman’s face in last night’s dream. It had borne a closer resemblance to the late Councilwoman Walker, and last night the pursuing animal was definitely identifiable as a coyote.
He’d awakened at the same point just as the animal had brought down the fleeing woman with her call to him for help coming too late to save her once again. He’d lain there in the dark, bathed in sweat and breathing hard as he stared up at the white stucco ceiling while trying to figure exactly what his subconscious was trying to tell his conscious mind.
It would be nice if the two minds could share information a little better, but mixing in facts related to the case with a previous dream is just too damn confusing for five in the morning.
With a sigh he got up, showered, got dressed, and tried to get his mind focused on the day ahead and the tasks at hand.
He very nearly succeeded even though he knew the effort was futile before he’d started.
****
Chee was already waiting for him in the lobby and after a very quick exchange of good mornings they walked outside and got into the car. After a few minutes of silence Del Rio had decided enough was enough and shifted in his seat to face her.
We need to talk this out, clear the air. We can’t have this hanging over our heads, he thought as he marshaled his thoughts.
“How much do you plan on telling Ben when we get there, Agent Del Rio?” she asked coolly before he could say a word.
So it’s the “all-business” approach then, Del Rio thought and was surprised at the depth of disappointment that he felt along with it. Fair enough, for now, but after this case is over, Miss Chee, you and I are going to have to have a very long talk about that kiss.
“I think we agree he’s in the clear,” Del Rio said aloud. “So we’ll let him know who our two top suspects are and why. Maybe then we can pry loose whatever bit of dirty laundry he’s trying so hard to hide from us.”
“You still think whatever it is will tell us which one of them is the killer?”
“Maybe. Or maybe it will just give us the reason why these people were killed and that should lead us to the who as well.”
Chee nodded, saying nothing more, and returned her full attention to her driving. Del Rio settled back and watched the arid landscape whiz by in matching silence until they arrived in Window Rock. Thankfully, unlike yesterday, the parking lot was only slightly full of cars with no crowds of panicked people milling about everywhere.
As Del Rio stepped out and headed for the main building, he spared a quick look over at the area where Walker had met her terrible end and fervently hoped she would be the last person to fall to whoever this killer was. At least nothing else had happened since then as he’d already checked in with Tso and Shirley. It was a small victory, and it did little to lift Del Rio’s spirits. Tso was waiting for them at the entrance.
“Here’s the tox screens on all four victims,” he said, handing a small stack of paper to Del Rio. “They ran the basic tests. That’s all they are set up for. They didn’t find anything suspicious.”
“How basic?” Del Rio asked, covering his disappointment as he scanned the reports. He’d been hoping some type of drug had been used on the victims to make them more compliant and account for the lack of defensive wounds.
“They can find the usual narcotics and alcohol,” Tso replied. “Some of the basic date rape stuff too, if they’re looking for it, but you’ll have to go to a bigger lab in Flagstaff or Albuquerque for anything else. We’ve got a small kit put together with samples from all of the victims, including the one’s you collected, ready to go if you want to send it out.”
Del Rio had been thinking of doing just that, only he had the Bureau’s lab in Phoenix in mind. He’d worked with the man in charge of the lab once before and Bart knew his stuff.
“Thanks, I’ll pick it up after we talk to Yazzie,” Del Rio said. “Is he in yet?”
“Yep,” Tso said. “He’s in his office and not overly happy with having so many eyes glued to him. Both Shelly and Jim are in their offices with an equal set of eyes on them.”
“Thanks,” Del Rio said as he headed for the door.
“Del Rio,” Tso called, waiting for Del Rio to turn back before continuing, “I think it’s safe to assume you are having Shelly and Jim watched as much as suspects as potential victims, right?”
“Yes.”
“Since you had Shirley and I watched as well…”
“Yes,” Del Rio said flatly. “You two were also suspects, but neither of you are suspects anymore.
”
“Can I ask when we were cleared?”
“Yes, you can ask,” Del Rio answered with a sly smile and turned away to enter the building without another word. Chee smiled apologetically as she stepped past Tso and followed Del Rio inside.
She caught up with him as he entered the main reception area of Yazzie’s office. Anna Kinlichee’s temporary replacement, which served as a poignant reminder to both of them that her uncle’s funeral was in two days, manned the desk and was an imposing two hundred pound man Del Rio would avoid picking a fight with. Two of the assigned protection officers, each as equally imposing as the seated man, stood silent guard by the door to Yazzie’s private office. Without pausing, Del Rio opened the door and walked right in unannounced.
Chee nearly barreled right into him as he stopped abruptly. It didn’t take her long to see why. The other two assigned guards were seated in the office as if nothing at all was wrong even though there clearly was a very big problem.
Ben Yazzie was nowhere to be seen in the room.
“What the bloody hell?” Del Rio roared, slipping a little back to his days in London with the curse.
“Is something wrong?” One of the guards asked.
“Is something…” Del Rio spluttered. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly before continuing. “Does it seem like we are one person short in this room to either of you?”
“Oh,” the second man said. “The President is fine. He’s taking a walk outside.”
“Alone?” Del Rio thundered.
“Are you trying to get him killed?” Chee added, her outrage at the nonchalant attitude of the guards an equal to Del Rio’s.
“He’s fine,” the first man replied. “He’s up on the roof, just above. We checked before he went out and no one was up there. The only way up is through that door over there.”
The man pointed at a small door that was slightly ajar, steps leading up to the roof could clearly be seen.
“You’ve never heard of ladders?” Del Rio asked, still steaming.
“In broad daylight,” the man said dismissively. “Who would be stupid enough to try that? Besides, we can see him from here. Look.”
He pointed out a window where the shadows from the roof fell on the ground outside. Sure enough pacing back and forth there was a shadow of a man, presumably Yazzie, and it looked like he was smoking a cigar. Del Rio shook his head in disbelief and headed for the door to join Yazzie on the roof, but a sudden movement out of the corner of his eye stopped him in his tracks. A second shadow had appeared and was approaching the first. It walked on two legs and looked humanoid, only the head was more shaped like a dog. Or a coyote.
“Oh shit,” Del Rio heard someone exclaim, not realizing it had been he who had uttered it, as he threw open the door and dashed up the stairs. He heard Chee order the men to alert Tso, Shirley, and the rest of the protection service people, and then he was out on the roof.
He burst out into the bright sunlight just in time to see Yazzie receive a smashing blow to his head from some type of club. The impact pitched Yazzie backward to land just on the edge of the roof. Yazzie lingered there for just a brief moment before his momentum and gravity carried him over the side. His attacker’s back was still to Del Rio, so that all he saw was a lot of fur and little else to identify him. Before Del Rio could draw his weapon or even yell out, the attacker leapt off the roof, away from where Yazzie had gone over. Del Rio was about to pursue when he noticed one set of fingers desperately clinging to the edge where Yazzie had rolled off and they were not going to hold on much longer.
Del Rio lunged for the fingers, grunting as he landed on the roof and slid across the gravel-covered surface right up to the edge. Somehow he managed to stop just short while barely managing to latch on to Yazzie as he lost his grip on the edge. Dazed and bleeding from a serious head wound, Yazzie flailed about wildly, making it even harder for Del Rio to maintain his hold on the man and keep both of them from going over, but he was fighting a losing battle as he slowly started to slide over the side as well.
Just as he was about to call out for help Chee appeared next to him, grabbing Del Rio with her left hand and Yazzie with her right and starting to pull. The two bodyguards were close behind and quickly grabbed on where they could. Together, the four of them hauled Yazzie back up to the safety of the roof.
“Chee,” Del Rio said raggedly around the pain in his chest. “You stay with Yazzie.”
“Where are you going?”
“After him,” Del Rio said with a jerk of his thumb in the direction the assailant had jumped. With that, he headed over to the point he’d seen the attacker leap from and looked down. There was no sign of the man and no apparent clue how he’d jumped off and not injured himself.
Undeterred, Del Rio took aim at a government van parked just below and hurled himself into space, twisting his body to roll across the top of the van as he landed to help break his fall.
It almost worked.
Del Rio hit the van hard and rolled over the side to bounce off the car parked next to it before hitting the pavement.
At this rate, he groused as he painfully stood up, I’m going to look like I did after a lacrosse tournament. The pain was set aside as he caught sight of a flash of fur rounding a corner of one of the outer buildings. Del Rio took off in pursuit, having no intention of letting the attacker get away.
Rounding the corner mere seconds behind his quarry Del Rio caught another blur of motion in the rocky formations to the north of the Window Rock and stepped up his pace. The guy was going to try to use his home field advantage to lose his pursuer, Del Rio thought with a grim smile. Not so fast buddy.
Unable to sleep on the flight out days before, Del Rio had familiarized himself with as much of the local topography as he’d thought might be useful. He had a much better idea of where they were going than his target would be giving him credit for. With each passing second that he kept seeing a blur of motion or a puff of dust ahead, he felt confident he would run down his prey.
When he realized the way they were going eventually led to a box canyon with no other way in or out, Del Rio smiled. Got you!
“Federal Agent, show me your hands,” he bellowed as he turned the corner into the box canyon with his gun out and leveled on his target in textbook form.
The four-legged coyote, a dead squirrel it had obviously just run down and killed hanging from its mouth, stared back blankly at Del Rio; the animal’s stance and look clearly asking if this human currently pointing a gun at its head had lost his mind.
Del Rio stared back at it in complete disbelief. He looked harder as if to be very sure he was seeing an actual coyote, and checked a third time just to be certain before lowering his weapon.
“Oh, for crying out loud,” he muttered in disgust. The flashes of movement he’d seen had been too high off the ground to have been a running coyote, but somewhere along the way they’d crossed paths with this animal, and Del Rio had picked up the wrong trail while the attacker had gotten away.
“Jack! Jack, where are you?” he heard Chee calling.
“Over here,” he shouted back, leaning against a large boulder as he caught his breath. Running all out at this altitude, over a mile above sea level, came at a price if you weren’t use to the thinner air. He heard Chee jog up, not even breaking a sweat or the least bit out of breath.
“What happened?”
“Well,” he began, “unless you think Jim or Shelly can shape shift and manage to turn themselves into that coyote over there, then it looks like I lost him.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah. Hey, I thought I told you…”
“Relax, Jack, Tso and Shirley are with Yazzie.”
“How is he?”
“Not sure, they were calling an ambulance when I came after you.”
“Okay,” Del Rio said as he pushed away from the rock, feeling a little better. “We might as well head on back and see for ourselves. Maybe that whack on the head loosened his to
ngue a little. Go on and eat your breakfast.” He’d addressed that last comment to the coyote who obediently turned away and trotted off with his prize. Del Rio watched it for a moment.
“I don’t know,” he said, semi-seriously. “Think I should shoot it just to be sure?”
“No, you probably shouldn’t,” Chee said. “Don’t feel too bad, Jack. Look at it this way, you did run down a coyote on foot, and in those fancy FBI shoes, too. That’s pretty impressive.”
Del Rio wasn’t sure if he was being teased or not.
“Great, I get fired for botching this investigation and I have a job as Navajo Nation Dog Catcher. Dear diary.”
“Come on Jack,” she joked back. “Let’s see if we can catch the two-legged kind before you suffer that terrible fate.”
By the time they’d walked back, Del Rio had decided that if he was going to be repeating that kind of a sprint he’d better switch to black sneakers for the duration. His feet were making their displeasure known.
Yazzie was just being loaded up in an ambulance and called out for Del Rio as soon as he’d spotted him.
“Del Rio,” Yazzie called out, “you have to order them to do it!”
“Do what, sir?”
“You have the authority, you can do it.”
“He wants us to take him to the hospital in Gallup, sir,” the paramedic explained. “He doesn’t want to go to the Indian Hospital in Fort Defiance.”
“Indian Hospital?” Del Rio asked, puzzled.
“The government-run hospitals for Native Americans,” Chee replied. “There’s one on or very near every big reservation in the country and they are all called Indian Hospitals. It’s the same setup for the VA Hospitals for veterans. The one in Gallup is bigger than the one here on the Res.”
“Is the Indian Hospital in Gallup that much better?” Del Rio asked.
“He doesn’t want to go there either. He’s talking about County General.”
Del Rio looked down at the injured man, puzzled by the request. Yazzie’s head was wrapped in a bloody bandage and he’d probably been banged up elsewhere during the attack, too. The injuries didn’t appear to be life-threatening, but why the insistence on the non-Indian Hospital thirty miles away?
Jack Del Rio: Complete Trilogy: Reservations, Betrayals, Endgames Page 15