“I listen to the music to keep me from listening to you,” Osborne said. “You’d finally wear me down and I’d be leaking all of our secrets.”
So James Taylor’s voice floated in, barely audible through the wrong side of Osborne’s earphones, something about plans putting an end to someone catching Chee’s attention. The plans someone made had permanently put an end to a still-unidentified well-dressed middle-aged man who might, or might not, be Carl Mankin. But whose plans? And what plans? And how did this fellow fit into them. Apparently not well because he’d been shot and then dumped facedown into a shallow wash and buried so casually that the wind had blown the dirt away from one hand and the back of his head. A sad way to go into that next existence.
Osborne had removed his headphones to rub his ear just as James Taylor was remembering the lonely times when he could not find a friend. His sadness worsened Chee’s mood. When his time came, Chee knew, his kin would come, and his friends. One of the Mormons in his paternal clan would suggest an undertaker, one of the born-again Christians in his maternal clan would agree, and the traditionals would politely ignore this. The designated one would wash his body, dress him properly, put his ceremonial moccasins on his feet, properly reversed to confuse any witch who might be hunting dead skin for his corpse powder bundle. Then his body would be carried to some secret place where no skinwalker could find it, no coyotes or ravens could reach it, no anthropologist could come to steal his little vial of pollen and his prayer jish to be stored in their museum basement. Then the sacred wind within him would begin its four-day journey into the Great Adventure that awaits us all.
Chee sighed.
Osborne took off his headset. “That Taylor stuff’s too sad for you,” he said. “You want something more upbeat? How about—”
Chee violated a traditional Navajo rule by interrupting.
“Look down there,” he said. “I think I see our blue Volks van pulling up to the pumps at Huerfano Trading Post.”
“OK,” said Osborne, starting the engine. “Let’s go talk to Carl Mankin.”
“Or whoever stole his credit card.”
It didn’t seem to be Mankin. He had just finished hosing gasoline into his tank, a short man, burly, needing a shave, and wearing greasy coveralls. Probably part standard white man and part Jicarilla Apache. He was screwing on the gas tank cap when Osborne braked his Ford beside him. He glanced at Chee through a set of dark sunglasses, and then at Osborne, looking as if he expected to recognize them and surprised that he hadn’t.
Osborne was out of the car, thrusting his FBI identification folder toward the man and asking him his identity.
Sunglasses took a step backward, startled. “Me? Why, I’m Delbert Chinosa.”
“Could we see your credit card?” Chee asked.
“Credit card?” Chinosa was clearly startled by this confrontation. “What credit card?”
“The one you’re holding there,” said Osborne. “Let me see that.”
“Well, now,” Chinosa said. “It’s not actually mine. I’ve got to give it back to my brother-in-law. But here.” He handed the card to Osborne. A Visa, Chee noticed. Chinosa had taken off his sunglasses and was looking tense and uneasy.
Osborne examined the card and nodded to Chee.
“This card is made out to Carl Mankin,” Osborne said. “You say you’re not Carl Mankin. Is your brother-in-law Carl Mankin?”
“No sir. He’s Albert Desboti. South of Dulce. I think this Mankin fella loaned it to him. Told him he could go ahead and use it.” Chinosa rubbed his hands on his coverall legs and managed a smile. “So Al told me I could go ahead an buy gas with it.”
“At the pumps where you don’t have to sign the credit card form,” Osborne said. “Was that his idea?”
Chinosa managed another smile. “Said that would be all right. Said no harm in that.”
“Well, not unless you’re the one getting stuck with the expense,” Osborne said. “And now we’re all going to have to go find Albert Desboti.”
They did, making the long drive into the Jicarilla Reservation; Chee with Chinosa guiding them in his van through the maze of dirt roads and past endless evidence that this famous oil and gas field was still producing its wealth of fossil fuel and Osborne following. Desboti seemed to have heard them coming. His little single-width mobile home was located on the east edge of Laguna Seca Mesa, and Desboti was standing in its door.
“Hey, Delbert,” he shouted. “You just in time for supper.” Then added something in Apache, which Chee interpreted as: “What you doing with that Navajo cop?”
Osborne was out of his sedan, flashing his FBI credentials, introducing himself. Chinosa was saying he’d told them Desboti had loaned him the credit card.
“What credit card?” Desboti said. He grimaced.
“You’re Albert Desboti?” Osborne said. “That correct?”
“That’s right. Al Desboti.”
Osborne displayed the Visa card. “You loan this to Mr. Chinosa?”
Desboti looked as though he didn’t know how to answer that. He said: “What?”
Osborne laughed. “We’re going to find out, one way or another. Why not just tell us about it. How’d you get the card. Save time.”
“This Manley guy. He said use it if I need it. Just pay him back.”
“It’s Mankin,” Osborne said. “Were you there when he was shot?”
“Shot?” Desboti’s eyes were wide.
“Or were you the one who shot him?”
Chee had been leaning against Chinosa’s van, watching Osborne work, thinking he was handling it fairly well, and maybe this blunt approach would save time. It did.
“I didn’t shoot anybody,” Desboti said, talking fast now. “I was cleaning up that campground. That’s my job. For the tribal parks. And bears had smelled the food in the trash and turned over the canister. Scattered the stuff all around, and there it was on the ground with the garbage. Dirty, but a pretty good-looking billfold. I just picked it up and cleaned it off.”
“Cleaned it off?”
Desboti grimaced again. “People come through here, they’ve saved up those damned paper diapers and they dump ’em out at the campgrounds.”
“Oh,” Osborne said, and glanced at Chee. It seemed to Chee that this answered a question for him. It made that trash bin a logical place to bury things you didn’t want recovered.
“The credit card was in the wallet? What else?” Osborne asked.
“No money,” Desboti said, looking thoughtful. Looking like he was trying to remember. “Nothing much. Driver’s license. Two keys. Looked like car keys. Pretty empty, like it was new.”
“You have it?”
Desboti opened his mouth, closed it, looked down, shrugged. Reached into his hip pocket and extracted a slim black leather wallet. “Just my stuff in it now,” he said. He extracted what looked to Chee like a twenty and several small bills and handed it to Osborne.
He inspected it. Extracted two small padlock keys and showed them to Desboti. “These yours?”
“No. They were in it.”
“Driver’s license? Any other papers?”
“Well, yeah. There was a driver’s license. And some cards. Insurance I think. And receipts you get at the gasoline pump. I think that was all.” Desboti nodded, licked his lips. “Did you say somebody shot that man?”
“Yes,” Osborne said. “Where are those other papers from the wallet.”
“Went back into the trash with the baby diapers, then into the truck and off to the trash dump.”
Chee closed his eyes. Osborne was going to say they’d go to that dump and Desboti was going to show them where he thought he dumped the load, and then they were going to start sorting through a mountain of dirty diapers, empty beer cans, and worse.
But Osborne didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then he shrugged. “Let’s go see exactly where you found this wallet.”
Which, Chee thought, would be a waste of time but far better than s
ifting through smelly diapers for the papers. And it was.
Driving back to Farmington through the summer darkness, Chee found himself beginning to form a fondness for Osborne. He steered the chat into telling Osborne about being sent by the Navajo Tribal Police back to a training session at the FBI Academy, comparing notes, relaxed and casual. “I still try to do those memory exercises they taught us. I can remember everything about that Jeep Cherokee rented to Mankin. How good are you?”
“I’ve lost some of it I guess. It was dirty white. Year-old model. Something over twenty-three thousand miles on it. Tires looked a little worse than that. Chip on the windshield. Lot of dirt and gravelly stuff on the floor pad. Lot of various tools in the back. Got it all written in my notes.”
“I remember his copy of the rental form had him refusing the insurance, so forth,” Chee said. “I think he put down some sort of oil-drilling outfit for his company.”
“Got you there,” Osborne said. “It was Seamless Weld.”
“Oh, well,” Chee said. “That could be pipeline maintenance. What did your boss say about Mankin? What he was doing up here? All that?”
“I don’t know,” Osborne said, looking grim. “We were told the El Paso office handled that.”
“They didn’t tell you what they found out? Boy! How can you work a case without that sort of information?”
Osborne didn’t answer.
“Maybe you’ll get it tomorrow,” Chee said. “The fax machine broke.”
“No,” Osborne said. “I called down there and asked about it and the word was to cool it. Just find out who was using that credit card. Other people were handling the case and they’d be giving me my instructions.”
“Be damned,” Chee said. “That sounds funny.”
“Funny? Yeah, I guess you could call it that.” But his tone was bitter.
“I’ll help you if I can,” Chee said. “I’d presume our victim is the man who checked out that Hertz rental car left over by that pipeline pumping station—or whatever that contraption is. Match the prints in the car with the corpse and—”
“I’m sure that’s all been done,” Osborne said.
Chee said: “Was it—” and then cut off the questions. Why embarrass Osborne. It wasn’t his fault. The FBI bureaucrats had always been notoriously inept. And now the word was that the Homeland Security law had laid another thick layer of political patronage on top of that—adding the chaos of a new power struggle to an already clogged system. Chee restarted his sentence. “Was it still my problem, I’d concentrate on that seven miles between where the car was left and where the body was dumped. Try to find somebody along that route who saw something. Then I’d look around the area he parked the car. There must be a reason they moved the body so far away from there. Killer shoots Mankin. His helper drives Mankin’s car off to hide it.”
“How about a better idea,” Osborne said. “Why don’t I just tell my supervisor if they won’t give me the information I need to work with, then I say to hell with it and quit.”
6
This windy afternoon was a sort of sad anniversary for Officer Bernadette Manuelito, and she was finding it tough to maintain her usual high level of cheerfulness. First the anniversary itself—six months since she had made the big decision—was confronting her with the thought that maybe she had made a horrible mistake in changing jobs and bidding good-bye to the Navajo Tribal Police and her family and friends (and Sergeant Jim Chee) to join the U.S. Customs Service.
A second damper on her spirits was the letter from Chee folded into a pocket of her U.S. Customs Service uniform. It was an infuriatingly ambiguous letter. So damned typical of Sergeant Chee. Third, was the uniform itself, the costume of the Customs Service Border Patrol. New, stiff, and uncomfortable. She had felt much better, and looked better, in the NTP uniform she had cast aside.
Forth, and finally, there was the immediate cause of her discontent: she was lost.
Being lost was a new and unpleasant experience for Bernie. In the “Land Between the Sacred Mountains” of her Navajos, she knew the landscape by heart. Look east, the Turquoise Mountain rose against the sky. To the west, the Chuska Range formed the horizon. Beyond that the San Francisco Peaks were the landmark. South, the Zuñi Mountains. North, the La Platas. No need for a compass. No need for a map. But down here along the Mexican border all the mountains looked alike to her—dry, saw-toothed, and unfriendly.
The rough and rutted road on which she had parked her Border Patrol pickup also seemed unfriendly. Her U.S. Geological Survey map labeled it “primitive.” Just ahead it divided. The left fork seemed to angle westward toward the Animas Mountains, and the right fork headed northward toward either the Hatchets or the Little Hatchets. The map indicated no such fork. It showed the track continuing westward toward the little New Mexico village of Rodeo (now her home), where it connected with an asphalt road running toward Douglas, Arizona.
The map was old, probably obsolete, obviously wrong. Bernie folded it. She’d take the right fork. It had the advantage of reducing the chance she wander across the Mexican border into the great emptiness of the Sonoran Desert, run out of gasoline, and into the custody of Mexican police, thereby becoming an illegal immigrant herself.
Fifteen minutes and eight miles later she stopped again where her track topped a rocky ridge. She would base her judgment on the reality as seen through her binoculars and not on a USGS survey, which probably was made when General Pershing was fighting Pancho Villa’s army ninety years ago.
Bernie leaned against the front fender and scanned the horizon. It was hot—a hundred and one yesterday and about the same today. The usual August thunderheads were building to the south and west. The heat haze shimmered over the rolling desert, making it hard to know exactly what one was seeing. Nothing much to see, anyway, Bernie thought, if you didn’t know which of those ragged peaks was where. But miles to the north she saw a glitter of reflected light. A windshield? It disappeared in the shimmer. But then she saw a plume of dust. Probably a truck and apparently not far to the west of where this track would take her.
Bernie climbed back into her pickup. She’d catch the truck and learn what it was doing out here. After all that was her job, wasn’t it? Maybe it would be operated by a “coyote” smuggling in a load of illegal aliens or bundles of coke. Probably not, since Ed Henry had told her they almost always operate at night. And Henry, being the Customs officer more or less in temporary charge of the Shadow Wolves tracking unit and an old-timer in this desolate section of border land, probably knew what he was talking about. Nice guy, Henry. Friendly, down to earth. One of those men totally confident in himself. Nothing like Sergeant Chee, whom she had left behind just six months ago. Chee tried to play the role of an experienced shift commander of the Navajo Tribal Police, but Chee wasn’t so sure of himself. And it showed. In some ways he was like a little boy. Didn’t know what to say to her, for example. Which brought her back to the letter in her pocket, which she didn’t want to think about.
So she thought about being lost instead. Whoever was making the dust could probably tell her where she was.
She caught up to the vehicle just west of a long ridge of volcanic rock that Bernie had decided might be part of either the Brockman Hills or the Little Hatchet Mountains. It was parked at the bottom of the brushy hump she was crossing—a green panel truck towing a small green trailer. It had stopped at a gate in a fence that seemed to run endlessly across the arid landscape. Across the fence a pickup sat. Bernie parked and got out her binoculars.
Two men at the gate, one with a mustache, wearing what looked to Bernie like some sort of military fatigue uniform and a long-billed green “gimme” cap. The other’s face was shaded by the typical wide-brimmed, high-crowned straw favored by those fated to work under the desert sun. This one was unlocking the gate, hanging the padlock on the wire, pulling the gate open. The green trailer, she noticed, wore a Mexican license plate.
Bernie picked up her camera, rolled down the si
de window. She had eight unexposed frames on a roll of thirty-six, the others being mostly portraits of tire tracks, shoe prints, and other evidence that either man or beast had passed through the empty landscape. Those Henry would examine and use to lecture her on what she needed to learn to become a competent tracker. This one would just prove to Henry that she was already keeping an eye on what was going on. She put on the long lens and focused. The gate was open now. Straw Hat stood beside it. Green Cap had a hand on his open truck door and stared up the road at her. Bernie took the picture. Green Cap said something to Straw Hat, pointed toward her, laughed, climbed into his truck. Straw Hat waved him through the gate.
Bernie started her truck, gunned it down the slope as fast as the rocky ruts allowed, and turned off the “primitive” road she had been following onto the lane that led into the gate—producing a cloud of dust. Straw Hat had relocked his gate and stood behind it. He removed the hat, fanned away the dust, and replaced it.
“Young lady, it’s way too hot to be in such a hurry,” he said. “What’s the rush?”
Bernie leaned out the window.
“I’ll need you to unlock that gate for me,” she said. “I want to see what that man’s hauling.”
“Well, I guess I could help you with that.” Straw Hat was grinning at her, a tall, lanky, long-faced man. “Save you some time and bad roads to cross. He’s not transporting no wetbacks. Not a thing of any possible interest to you folks. Just a bunch of construction gear.”
“Well, thank you, sir,” Bernie said. “But my boss is going to insist that I should have gone on in and seen for myself.”
Straw Hat didn’t respond to that.
“Just doing my job,” Bernie added. She made a dismissive gesture. “United States Border Patrol.”
“My name’s O’day,” Straw Hat said. “Tom.” He raised his right hand in the “glad to meet you” gesture.
“Bernadette Manuelito—Officer Manuelito today, and while we’re talking, the man I want to see about is getting away.”
“Trouble is,” said Tom O’day, “I can’t let you in here.” He pointed to the No Trespassing sign mounted to the gate post with NO ADMISSION WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION printed under it. “You got to have a note from the fella that owns this place. That or get him to call out here and arrange to get the gate unlocked.”
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