other one alive.
Why? Because only this man knew how to signal a safe landing to the pilot. That would be why. And after the signal had been flashed, killing the man. Why would Ironfingers leave one body and hide the other? To give the owners of the dope a misleading impression about who had stolen it? Possibly. Chee thought about it. The business about the body had bothered Chee from the first and it bothered him now. Musket, or whoever had been the driver, must have planned to bury it eventually. Why else the shovel? But why bury it when it would be easier to carry it back into some arroyo and leave it for the scavengers?
Chee got up, took out his pocket knife, and opened its longest blade. With that, he probed into the bed of the wash near where he had sat. The blade sank easily into the damp sand. But two inches below the surface, the earth was compact. He looked around him. The basalt upthrust was a barrier around which runoff water swirled. There the bottom would be irregular. In some places the current would cut deeply after hard rains, only to have the holes filled in by the slower drainage after lesser storms. Chee climbed out of the wash and hurried back to his pickup at the windmill. From behind the front seat he extracted the jack handle—a long steel bar bent at one end to provide leverage for a lug wrench socket and flattened into a narrow blade at the other to facilitate prying off hub caps. Chee took it back to the wash.
It took just a few minutes to find what he was looking for. The place had to be behind the basalt, because old Taylor Sawkatewa had said the man who unloaded the suitcases had taken them out of sight in the darkness. Chee probed into the damp sand no more than twenty times before he struck aluminum.
There was the thunk of steel on the thin metal of the case. Chee probed again, and again, and found the second case. He knelt and dug back the sand with his hand. The cases were buried upright, side by side, with their handles no more than six inches below the surface.
Chee carefully refilled the little holes his jack handle had made, replaced the sand he had dug away with his hands, patted it to the proper firmness, and then took out his handkerchief and brushed away the traces he'd left on the surface. Then he walked over the cache. It felt no different from the undisturbed sand. Finally he spent almost an hour making himself a little broom of rabbit brush and carefully erasing the tracks of Jimmy Chee from the bottom of Wepo Wash. If anyone ever tracked him, they'd find only that he had come down the arroyo to the wash, and then gone back up it again to the windmill. And driven away.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The dispatcher reached chee just as he turned off the Burnt Water-Wepo Wash road onto the pavement of Navajo Route 3. She had a tip from the Arizona Highway Patrol. One of their units had watched Priscilla Bisti and her boys loading six cases of wine into her pickup truck at Winslow that morning. Mrs. Bisti had been observed driving northward toward the Navajo Reservation on Arizona 58.
'What time?'
'About ten-fourteen,' the dispatcher said.
'Anything else?'
'No.'
'Can you check my desk and see if I got any telephone messages?'
'I'm not supposed to,' the dispatcher said. The dispatcher was Shirley Topaha. Shirley Topaha was just two years out of Tuba City High School, where she had been a cheerleader for the Tuba City Tigers. She had pretty eyes, and very white teeth, and perfect skin, and a plump figure. Chee had noticed all this, along with her tendency to flirt with all officers, visitors, prisoners, etc., requiring only that they be male.
'The captain won't notice it,' Chee said. 'It might save me a lot of time. It would really be nice if you did.'
'I'll call you back,' the dispatcher said.
That came about five minutes later. It came about two minutes after Chee had turned his patrol car westward toward Moenkopi and Tuba City. Which was too bad, because it meant he had to stop and turn around.
'Two calls,' Shirley said. 'One says call Johnson, Drug Enforcement Agency, and there's this number in Flagstaff.' She gave him the number. 'And the other says please call Miss Pauling at the Hopi motel.'
'Thanks, Shirley,' Chee said.
'Ten-four,' said Shirley.
The man at the desk of the Hopi Cultural Center motel rang Miss Pauling's telephone five times and declared that she wasn't in. Chee checked the motel dining room. She was sitting at a corner table, a cup of coffee in front of her, immersed in a Phoenix
'You left a call for me,' Chee said. 'Did Gaines come back?'
'Yes,' Miss Pauling said. 'Sit down. Do you know how to tap a telephone?' She looked intense, excited.
'Tap a telephone?' Chee sat down. 'What's going on?'
'There was a message for Gaines,' Miss Pauling said. 'Someone called and left it. They'd call back at four, and if he wanted me to make an arrangement, to be in his room to take the call.'
'The clerk showed you the message?'
'Sure,' she said. 'He checked us in together, and we got adjoining rooms. But we don't have much time.' She glanced at her watch. 'Less than half an hour. Can we get the telephone tapped?'
'Miss Pauling,' Chee said. 'This is Second Mesa, Arizona. I don't know how to tap a telephone.'
'I think it's easy,' she said.
'It looks easy on television,' Chee said. 'But you have to have some sort of equipment. And you have to know how.'
'You could call somebody?'
'Not and get a telephone tapped in anything less than about three days,' Chee said. 'In the Navajo Police, it's out of our line of work. If you call the fbi in Phoenix, they'd know how, but they'd have to get a court order.' And
