Chee had agreed to that, mentally changing the 'must have' into a 'most likely.'
Largo pushed himself out of his chair and walked to the wall map, a bulky man with a barrel chest and thin hips—the top-heavy wedge shape so common among western Navajos. He waved a finger around a portion of the map encompassing the Shiprock massif, the Carrizo and Lukachukai mountains, the north end of the Chuskas, and the country between them. 'Narrows it down to this little area,' Largo said. 'See how quick you can find him.'
The little area was about the size of Connecticut, but its population wouldn't be more than a few hundred. And the few hundred would be people who would unfailingly notice and remember anything unusual. If Gorman had driven his green sedan into the country south of Teec Nos Pos, or west of Littlewater, it would have been seen and talked about and remembered—the subject of speculation. It was simply a matter of driving and driving and driving, and talking and talking and talking, for however many days it took to track it down. 'How quick I find him depends on how lucky I get,' Chee said.
'Get lucky, then,' Largo said. 'And when you find him, just call in. Don't try to arrest him. Don't go anywhere near him. Don't do nothing to spook him. Just get on the radio and get word to us, and we tell the Agency.' Largo was leaning against the map, staring at Chee, expression neutral at best. 'Understand what I'm saying? Don't screw it up. It's an fbi case. It is not, repeat not, a case for the Navajo Tribal Police. It's an Agency case. It is not our affair. It is not the affair of Officer Jim Chee. Got it?'
'Sure,' Chee said.
'Chee finds. Chee calls in. Chee leaves it at that. Chee does not do any freelance screwing around,' Largo said.
'Right,' Chee said.
'I mean it,' Largo said. 'I don't know much about it, but from what I hear, this guy is tied up somehow or other with some big case in Los Angeles. And an fbi agent got killed.' Largo paused long enough to allow Chee to consider what that meant. 'That means that when the fbi says they want to talk to this guy, they
And so Chee had found him and now, having found him, was guiding in the fbi to finish the job, with Deputy Bales along to properly represent the San Juan County Sheriffs Department.
Deputy Bales stifled a yawn. 'Yeah,' he said. 'The dead guy came in on a chartered plane. Or anyway, the people at the airport said a private plane flew in, and he got out of it and rented the car. A hood out of Los Angeles. With a long rap sheet.'
'Um,' Chee said. He'd heard about the plane and the rented car and the police record. The homicide was exotic enough to be fuel for gossip. The fbi told nobody anything. But the Farmington police told the New Mexico State Police, who told the Sheriffs Office, who told the Navajo cops, who told the Bureau of Indian Affairs law and order people, who told the Arizona Highway Patrol. In the small, dull world of law enforcement, anything unusual is a precious commodity, worth weeks of conversation.
'I wonder if he really is wounded,' the deputy said.
'Pretty sure about that,' Chee said. 'Old Joseph Joe is supposed to have seen him hanging on the car door, looking hurt. And when I looked in the car, there was blood on the front seat.'
'Been wondering about that,' the deputy said. 'How'd you find it?'
'Just took time,' Chee said. 'You know how it is. Just keep asking until you ask the right person.'
It had taken three days to find the right person, a boy getting off the bus from the Toadlena school. He'd seen the green sedan going by on the road that led from Two Gray Hills southward toward Owl Springs. Chee had stopped at the Two Gray Hills Trading Post and got a fix on who lived down that road and how to find their places. Then another hard afternoon of driving on doubtful trails. 'Found it about dark yesterday,' he added.
Bales had tilted his hat far back on his head. 'And Sharkey decides to wait and catch him about daylight, when he's sleeping. Or when we hope he's sleeping. Course we don't even know he's there.'
'No,' Chee said. But he had no doubt at all that Albert Gorman was there. This terrible road led to the Begay hogan and nowhere else. And from his abandoned car, Gorman's tracks led toward the Begay place. They were the uncertain, wavering tracks of a man either drunk or badly hurt. And finally, there was what he'd learned at the trading post at Two Gray Hills on his way back. The trader wasn't there, but the woman handling the cash register had told him that, yes, Old Man Begay had a visitor.
'Hosteen Begay came in three-four days ago and asked what medicine to buy for somebody who hurt himself and had a lot of pain,' she'd said. She'd sold him a bottle of aspirin and a stamp for an envelope he'd wanted mailed.
For several hundred yards the dim parking lights had been picking up the black gloss of spilled crankcase oil. Now they reflected from a green Plymouth sedan, blocking the trail. Chee parked his truck behind it, cut the lights and the engine, and climbed out.
Sharkey had the window of his pickup down. He was leaning out, looking at Chee.
'About three quarters of a mile up the track here,' Chee said, pointing.
It was then he noticed for the first time that fog was forming. A trace of it drifted like gray smoke through the beam of Sharkey's lights just as he turned them off, and then the smell of fog was in Chee's nostrils and the dampness on his face.
Chapter 3
In the high, dry mountains of the Colorado Plateau, fog is out of its element. It forms as part of a climatic accident, produced when a cold front crosses a mountain range and collides with warmer air on the opposite slope. And it survives no longer than a fish out of water. By dawn, when the four of them reached the place of Hosteen Begay, the fog had already lost its character as a solid blinding cloud. Now it survived only in pockets, as patches and fragments. Chee stood at the edge of one such fragment, exactly where Sharkey had told him to stand—on the slope west of the meadow where Begay had built his hogan. His role was to make sure that if Gorman tried to escape he would not escape in that direction. Chee rested a hip against a boulder. He waited and watched. At the moment, he watched Deputy Bales, who stood beside a ponderosa pine, right hand against the tree trunk and his left holding a long-barreled revolver, its muzzle pointing at the ground. The bottom of the tree trunk and Bales's lower legs were obscured by the mist, making—in the dim light—man and tree seem somehow detached from solid earth. Over the meadow, the fog was almost solid, frayed only here and there by the very beginning of a cold dawn breeze. Chee glanced at his watch. In eleven minutes it would be sunrise.
