than the darkness surrounding it, a sense of slow movement. Then the movement stopped. A light flashed on—a yellow beam probing the boulders along the wall of the arroyo. The moving light silhouetted first the legs of whoever held the flashlight, then the right arm and shoulder and the shape of a pistol held, muzzle down, in the right hand. Then the light flicked off again. In the renewed darkness Chee could see only the shape of the yellow light imprinted on his iris. The shape of the man was lost to him. He ducked behind the chamiso again, waiting for vision to return.
When it did, the arroyo was empty.
Chee waited for the first dim light before he made his move for his truck. His first impulse was to abandon it. To slip away in the darkness and make the long walk back to the Burnt Water Trading Post and thereby avoid the risk that the man who had hunted him in the darkness was waiting for him at the truck. But as time ticked away, the urgency and reality of the danger diminished with it. Within an hour, what his instincts had told him of danger had faded along with the adrenaline it had pumped into his blood. What had happened was easy enough to read. Someone interested in recovering the drugs had rented a plane to keep an eye on the area. Chee's lights had been seen. Someone had been sent to find him and learn what he was doing. The pistol in hand was easily explained. The hunter was seeking the unknown in a strange and lonely darkness. He was nervous. He would have seen Chee's rifle on its rear-window rack but he'd have had no way of knowing Chee's pistol was locked away.
Even so, Chee was cautious. He moved along the arroyo rim to a point where he could look down at the truck. He spent a quarter of an hour sitting in the shelter of the rocks there, watching for any sign of movement. All he saw was a burrowing owl returning from its nocturnal hunt to its hole in the bank across from him. The owl scouted the truck and the area around it. If it saw anything dangerous, it showed no sign of it until it saw Chee. Then it shied violently away. That was enough for Jim Chee. He got up and walked to the truck.
With his pistol back on his belt, Chee checked the area around the arroyo mouth to confirm what the burrowing owl had told him. Nothing human was watching the area. Then he took a look at the tracks his hunter had left. The man wore boots with worn waffle soles, the same soles he'd noticed at the site of the crash. Someone in these same boots had placed the fatal lanterns. He'd approached the truck from downwash, left tracks all around it, and then walked almost a half mile up the arroyo and back again. Finally he'd left the way he had come.
Chee spent the rest of the morning examining the two downwash arroyos which the map suggested might have offered hiding places for a car. Nothing that left tire tracks had gone up either of them. He sat in the truck cab, finished the last of his crackers with the last of his water, and thought it all through again. Then he went back to both arroyos, walked a half mile up from their mouths, and made an intensive hands-and-knees spot check of likely places. Nothing. That eliminated the possibility that Palanzer, or Musket, or whoever was driving, had done a thorough and meticulous job of wiping out tracks at the turn-in point. With that out of the way, he drove back up to the arroyo where he'd spent the night.
Once it had been his favorite prospect. But he'd written it off, just as he had first written off the downstream arroyos when he'd found no trace of tracks at the mouth. Now he intended to be absolutely sure, and when he was finished, he would be equally sure that no car was hidden up Wepo Wash. Chee skipped the first hundred yards, which he'd already studied fruitlessly. Upstream the arroyo had cut through an extensive bed of hard-packed caliche. Here there were only occasional pockets of sand and Chee inspected those which couldn't have been avoided by a wheeled vehicle. He took his time. He found lizard tracks, and the trail left by a rattlesnake, the tiny paw marks of kangaroo rats, the marks left by birds and a variety of rodents. No tire marks. At a broad expanse of packed sand another hundred yards upstream, he made the same sort of check. Here he found a scratch curving across the sandy surface. Parallel with it were other lines, almost invisible. Chee squatted on his heels, looking. What had caused this? A porcupine might have dragged his tail across here. But this wasn't porcupine country. It would starve a porcupine.
Chee reached behind him, broke a limb off a growth of rabbit bush. He swept it across the sand. It produced a half-dozen scratches and a pattern of tiny parallel furrows. Chee examined them. Given a week for wind and gravity to soften their edges, these furrows would look much like what he had found. The sand had been swept.
Chee walked rapidly up-arroyo with hardly a glance at its bed. Sooner or later whoever had done the sweeping would have run out of time, or of patience, and decided enough had been done. About a thousand yards later, he found where that had happened.
He noticed the broom first. It was dried now, its color changed from its normal gray-green to gray-white, which made it instantly visible in the growth of healthy brush where it had been thrown. Chee salvaged it, inspected it, and confirmed that it had been used as a broom, then he tossed it away.
He found tire tracks at the next stretch of sand. They were faint, but they were unmistakable. Chee dropped to his hands and knees and studied the pattern of marks. He matched them in his memory with the tracks he had seen at the site of the wreckage. They were the same tread pattern.
Chee rocked back on his heels, pushed his hat off his forehead, and wiped away the sweat. He had found the invisible car. Unless it could fly, it was somewhere up this arroyo.
Chapter Fifteen
After that there was no need for tracking. Chee paused only to check the few places where small gullies drained into the arroyo, places which might conceivably provide an exit route. He walked steadily up-arroyo toward the Black Mesa. The arroyo wound through increasingly rough country, its bed narrowing, becoming increasingly rocky and brush-choked. At places now the vehicle had left a trail of broken branches. Late in the afternoon, Chee heard the airplane again, droning miles away over the place where he had left his truck parked. When it approached up the arroyo he stood out of sight under an overhang of brush until it disappeared. It was just sundown when he found the vehicle, and then he almost walked past it. He was tired. He was thirsty. He was thinking that within another hour it would be too dark to see. He saw not the vehicle itself but the broken brush it had left in its wake. Its driver had turned it up a narrow gully that fed the arroyo, forced it into a tangle of mountain mahogany and salt brush, and closed the growth as well as possible behind it.
It was a dark-green gmc carryall, apparently new. In a little while Chee would find out if it was loaded with cocaine, or perhaps with bales of currency intended to pay for cocaine. But there was no hurry. He took a moment to think. Then he scouted the area carefully, looking for tracks. If he could find the tracks of waffle soles and of cowboy boots, it would confirm what he already knew—that those men had driven away in the car he'd heard leaving. The area around the carryall was a mat of leaves and twigs, and the gully bottom was granular decomposed granite where it wasn't solid rock. Impossible for tracking. Chee found scuff marks but nothing he could identify.
The carryall was locked, its windows rolled all the way up, and totally fogged with interior moisture. With a sealed vehicle, some such fogging was usual, even in this arid climate, but these windows were opaque. There must be some source of moisture locked inside. Chee sat on a boulder and considered what to do.
Not only wasn't this his case; he'd been specifically warned away from it by the people whose case it was. Not only had he been warned off by the feds; Captain Largo had personally and specifically ordered him to keep clear of it. If he broke into the carryall, he'd be tampering with evidence.
