Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 14] (6 page)

“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.

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.