'Had a funny feeling from the very first,' the deputy said. 'When Sharkey was telling us about it back there in Captain Largo's office. Felt the skin tightening on the back of my neck. Kind of a coldness. And prickling on the arms. Somebody's going to get hurt, I thought. Somebody's going to get their butt shot off.'
Chee sensed the deputy was looking at him, waiting for him to say something. 'Um,' Chee said.
'Yes,' the deputy agreed. 'I got a feeling that Gorman fella's laying up there with his pistol cocked, and when we walk in somebody's going to get killed.'
Chee eased the Navajo Tribal Police carryall around a washout. In his rearview mirror he could see the parking lights of Sharkey's pickup truck. The fbi agent was staying about a hundred yards behind him. The deputy now interrupted his monologue to light a cigaret. In the flare of the kitchen match, the man's face looked yellow—an old and sinister face. The deputy's name was Bales and he was old enough, with even more years weathered into his skin by the high-country sun of San Juan County. But not sinister. His reputation was for easygoing, over-talkative mildness. Now he exhaled smoke.
'It's not a feeling that I'm going to get shot,' Bales said. 'It's a sort of general feeling that somebody will.'
Chee was conscious again that Bales was waiting for him to say something. This white man's custom of expecting a listener to do more than listen was contrary to Chee's courteous Navajo conditioning. He'd first become aware of it his freshman year at the University of New Mexico. He'd dated a girl in his sociology class and she'd accused him of not listening to her, and it had taken two or three misunderstandings before he'd finally fathomed that while his people presume that if they're talking, you are listening, white people require periodic reassurance. Deputy Sheriff Bales was requiring such reassurance now, and Chee tried to think of something to say.
'Somebody already got shot,' he said. 'Couple of people got shot, including Gorman.'
'I meant somebody new,' Bales said.
'If it's not you,' Chee said, 'that leaves me, or Sharkey, or that other fbi agent he brought along. Or maybe Old Man Begay.'
'I don't think so,' Bales said. 'I think it would need to be one of us, the way this premonition feels.' Satisfied now that Chee was listening, Bales inhaled deeply and allowed a moment of silence while he savored the taste of the tobacco.
Mary Landon had stirred her coffee, looking at it and not at him. 'You've made up your mind to stay,' she'd said. 'Haven't you. When were you going to tell me?' And he'd said what? Something stupid or insensitive, probably. He couldn't remember exactly what he'd said. But he remembered her words—vividly, clearly, exactly.
'Whatever you say about it, it just has one meaning. It means I come second. What comes first is Jim Chee, being Navajo. I'm to be sort of an appendage to his life. Mrs. Chee and the Navajo children.' He'd interrupted her, denying that accusation, and she had said the Navajo Way was important to him only when it reinforced what he already wanted to do. She'd said that before, and he knew exactly what was coming. The Navajos, she'd reminded him, married into the wife's clan. The husband joined the wife's family. 'How about that, Jim Chee?' she'd asked. There was nothing he could say to her.
The deputy exhaled again and rolled down the window a bit to let the cold air suck out the smoke. 'Always chaps my butt the way the fbi won't ever tell you anything,' he said. 'The subject is Albert Gorman.' Bales raised the pitch of his voice a notch in a weak attempt to mimic the West Texas sound of Agent Sharkey. ' 'Gorman is believed armed with a thirty-eight-caliber pistol.' ' Bales switched back to his own rusty voice. 'Believed, hell. They took a thirty-eight slug out of the guy he shot.' Bales switched voices again. ' 'Los Angeles informs us that it is particularly important to apprehend this subject alive. He is wanted for questioning.'' Bales snorted. 'Ever arrest anyone who wasn't wanted for questioning about something?' Bales chuckled. 'Like how many beers he had before he started driving.'
Chee grunted. He eased the carryall around a place where the soil was cut away from a ridge of stone. The rearview mirror assured him again that Sharkey's pickup was still behind him.
'I don't see how we can compromise,' Mary Landon had said. 'I just don't see how we can work it out.' And he'd said, 'Sure, Mary. Sure we can.' But she was right. How could you compromise it? Either he stayed with the Navajo Police or he took a job off the reservation. Either he stayed Navajo or he turned white. Either they raised their children in Albuquerque, or Albany, or some other white city as white children or they raised them on the Colorado Plateau as Dinee. Halfway was worse than either way. Chee had seen enough of that among displaced Navajos in the border towns to know. There was no compromise solution.
'You know what we heard?' the deputy said. 'We heard that this business was tied up with an fbi agent getting killed out in L.A. We heard that Gorman and Lerner, the guy he shot at the laundry, was both working for some outfit on the Coast. Some outfit that stole cars. Big operation. And some big shots got indicted. And an fbi agent got knocked off. And that's why the Feds are so hot to talk to this Gorman.'
'Um,' Chee said. He steered the carryall cautiously around a juniper, but not cautiously enough. The left front wheel dropped into a hole the parking lights hadn't revealed. The jarring jolt shook the deputy's hat down over his eyes.
'The car the dead guy was driving,' the deputy said. 'It was rented there at the Farmington airport. They tell you that?'
'No,' Chee said. As a matter of fact, they hadn't told him anything much—which was exactly what Chee had learned to expect when he was running errands for the Federals. 'Got a little job for you,' Captain Largo said. 'We need to find that fellow in the parking lot.' It had seemed an odd thing to say, since the Shiprock agency of the Navajo Tribal Police, along with every other cop along the Arizona-New Mexico border, had all been looking for that fellow. But Chee had also come to expect Largo to say odd things. Largo had then explained himself by handing Chee a folder. It included a copy of the photograph of Albert Gorman that the fbi had provided, a rap sheet showing several arrests and one conviction for larceny of motor vehicles, and some biographical statistics. There were no blank spaces on the forms used by the Los Angeles Police Department for the sort of information Chee needed: Gorman's mother's name and her clan, which Albert Gorman had been 'born to,' and the clan of Gorman's father, which Albert had been 'born for.' Unless Albert Gorman had forgotten how to be a Navajo in Los Angeles or, as sometimes happened off the reservation, had never learned the Navajo Way, the homes of these clansmen would be the place to look for Albert Gorman. Largo knew that.
'What I want you to do is drop everything else you're fooling around with. Just come up with this guy,' Largo had said. 'He didn't pass the roadblocks at Teec Nos Pos, and we had a car there fifteen minutes after the shooting, so he didn't go west. And he didn't get to the roadblock at Sheep Springs, so he didn't get through us going south. So unless he turned east to Burnham, and that road doesn't go anyplace, he must have gone up into the Chuskas.'
