ago, Tomas Charley was out there and McGinnis told him. Largo paused, and looked up at Leaphorn through his bifocals. You know McGinnis?
Leaphorn laughed. From way back when I was new and working out of here. He was sort of a one-man radar station/listening post/gossip collector. I remember I used to think it wouldn’t be too hard to catch him doing something worth about ten years in stir. He still have that place up for sale?
That place has been for sale for forty years, Largo said. If somebody offered to buy it, it'd scare McGinnis to death.
That sighting report, Leaphorn said. Anything helpful?
Naw, Largo said. She was driving her sheep out of a gully, and just as she came out of it, the copter came over just a few feet off the ground. Largo waved his hand impatiently at the file. Its all in there. Scared the hell out of her. Her horse threw her and ran off and it scattered the sheep. Charley went to talk to her day before yesterday. Said she was still pissed off about it.
Was it the right copter?
Largo shrugged. Blue and yellow or black and yellow. She remembered that. And pretty big. And noisy. Maybe it was, and maybe it wasn’t.
Was it the right day?
Seemed to be, Largo said. She was bringing in the sheep because she was taking her husband and the rest of the bunch to a Yeibachi over at Spider Rock the next day.
Charley checked on it and the ceremonial was the day after the Santa Fe robbery. So that’s the right day.
What time?
That’s about right, too. Just getting dark, she said.
They thought about it. Outside there was thunder again.
Think we could have missed it? Largo asked.
We could have, Leaphorn said. You could hide Kansas City out there. But I don’t think we did.
I don’t either, Largo said. You’d have to land it someplace where you can get someplace else from. Like near a road.
Exactly, Leaphorn said.
And if they left it near a road, somebody would have come across it by now. Largo extracted a pack of Winstons from his shirt pocket, offered them to Leaphorn, and then lit one for himself. Its funny, though, he said.
Yes, Leaphorn said. The strangest part of it all, he thought, was how well the entire plan had stuck together, how well it had been coordinated, how well it had worked. You didn’t expect such meticulous planning from a militant political group and the Buffalo Society was as militant as they get. It had split off from the American Indian Movement after the AIMs seizure of Wounded Knee had fizzled away into nothing accusing the movements leaders of being gutless. It had mailed out a formal declaration of war against the whites. It had pulled a series of bombings, and two kidnappings that Leaphorn could remember, and finally this affair at Santa Fe. There, a Wells Fargo armored truck leaving the First National Bank of Santa Fe had been detoured down one of Santa Fe's narrow old streets by a man wearing a city policemans uniform. Other Society members had simultaneously congealed downtown traffic to a motionless standstill by artfully placed detour signs. There had been a brief fight at the truck and a Society member had been critically wounded and left behind. But the gang had blasted off the truck door and escaped with almost $500,000.
The copter had been reserved at the Santa Fe airport for a charter flight. It had taken off with a single passenger about the same moment the Wells Fargo truck had left the bank.
It hadn’t been missed, in the excitement, until the pilots wife had called the charter company late that night worrying about her husband. Checking back the next day, police learned it had been seen taking off from the Sangre de Cristo Mountain foothills just east of Santa Fe about an hour after the robbery. It was seen, and definitely identified, a little later by a pilot approaching the Los Alamos airport. It had been headed almost due west, flying low. It had been seen and almost definitely identified about sundown by a Gas Company of New Mexico pipeline monitoring crew working northeast of Farming-ton.
Again it was flying low and fast, and still heading west. A copter, this time identified only as black and yellow and flying low, had been reported by the driver of a Greyhound bus crossing U.S. 666 northwest of Ship-rock. These reports had been coupled with the fact that the missing copters full-tank range was only enough to fly it from Santa Fe to less than halfway across the Navajo Reservation and had caused the Navajo Police a full week of hard and fruitless searching.
The FBI report on this affair showed the copter had been reserved by telephone the previous day in the name of the local engineering company which often chartered it, that a passenger had emerged from a blue Ford sedan and boarded the copter without anyone getting much of a look at him, and that the Ford had thereupon driven away. A check disclosed that the engineering company had not reserved the copter and there was absolutely nothing else to go on. The FBI noted that while it had no doubt the copter had been used to fly away seven large sacks of bulky cash, the connection was purely circumstantial. Again, the planning had been perfect.
Oh, well, Largo said. He removed his glasses, frowned at them, ran his tongue over the lenses, polished them quickly with his handkerchief, and put them on again. He lowered his chin and peered at Leaphorn through the upper half of the bifocals. Here they are, he said, sliding the accordion files and the folder across the desktop. Old heroin case, old homicide, old missing aircraft, and new herd the tourist job.
Thanks, Leaphorn said.
For what? Largo asked. Getting you into trouble? You know what I think, Joe? This isn’t smart at all, this getting personal about this guy. That ain’t good business in our line of work. Whyn't you forget it and go on over to Window Rock and help take care of the Boy Scouts? Well catch this fellow for you.
You’re right, Leaphorn said. He tried to think of a way to explain to Largo what he felt.
Would Largo understand if Leaphorn described how the man had grinned as he tried to kill him? Probably not, Leaphorn thought, because he didn’t understand it himself.
