while, allowing his eyes to adjust, breathing the cool, clean high-altitude air. Smelling dust, and sagebrush, shaken, remembering the day they brought Emma's body home from the hospital.
It had still been unreal to him, what had happened at Gallup, what the doctor had told him. It had left him stunned. Emma's brothers had come to talk to him about it. He'd simply told them that he knew Emma would want a traditional burial, and they'd left.
They'd taken the body to her mother's place over near Blue Gap Chapter House, on the edge of Black Mesa. Under the brush arbor her old aunt had washed her, and combed out her hair, and dressed her in her best blue velvet skirt, and her old squash-blossom necklace, put on her rings, and wrapped her in a blanket. He had sat in the hogan, watching. Her brothers had picked her up then, and put the body in the back of their truck, and driven down the track toward the cliffs. In about an hour they came back without her and took their cleansing sweat bath. He didn't know--would never know-- where they'd left her. In a crevice somewhere, probably. High. Protected by deadwood from the predators. Hidden away. He had stayed for two days of the silent days of mourning. Tradition demanded four days, to give the dead time to complete their journey into the oblivion of death. Two days was all he could stand. He'd left them.
And her. But no more of this.
Chee's pickup was still there. Leaphorn walked to it.
'Ya te'eh,' Chee said, acknowledging him.
'Ya te,' Leaphorn said. He leaned on the truck door. 'What brings you out to the Reverend Slick Nakai's revival?'
Chee explained about the backhoe loader, and the abortive chase, and what Tso had told him about where the Backhoe Bandit might be found.
'But I don't think he is going to show up tonight,' Chee said. 'Getting too late.'
'You going to go in and ask Nakai who this fellow is?' Leaphorn asked.
'I'm going to do that,' Chee said. 'When he's through preaching and when I get a look at the people coming out of the tent.'
'You think Nakai would tell you he didn't know this guy, and then tip him off you're looking for him?'
Long silence. 'He might,' Chee said. 'But I think I'll risk it.'
Leaphorn didn't comment. It was the decision he would have made. Handle it on Navajo time. No reason to rush in there.
There was no hurry for him either, but he went back into the tent. He'd hear the rest of Nakai's sermon, and see how much money he took in at his collection. And how many, if any, pots. Leaphorn was thinking that maybe he'd learned a little more than he'd first realized. Something had jogged his memory. The thin Navajo with the guitar was the same man he'd seen helping Maxie Davis at the excavation at Chaco Canyon. That answered one small question. A Christian Navajo wouldn't be worrying about stirring up the chindi of long-dead Anasazi. But it also made an interesting connection--a man who dug up scientific pots at Chaco worked for a man who sold theoretically legal pots. And a man who sold theoretically legal pots linked to a man who stole a backhoe. Backhoes were machines notoriously useful in uprooting Anasazi ruins and despoiling their graves.
It was just about then, as he walked out of the darkness into the tent, that he became aware of something in his attitude about all this.
He felt an urgency now. The disappearance of Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal had been merely something curious--an oddity. Now he sensed something dangerous. He had never been sure he could find the woman. Now he wondered if she'd be alive if he did.
Chapter Five
T ^ t
REMEMBER, BOY,' Uncle Frank Sam Nakai would sometimes tell Chee, 'when you're tired of walking up a long hill you think about how easy it's going to be walking down.' Which was Nakai's Navajo way of saying things tend to even up. For Chee this proved, as his uncle's aphorisms often did, to be true. Chee's bad luck was followed by good luck.
Early Monday a San Juan County sheriffs deputy, who happened to have read the paperwork about the stolen flatbed trailer and backhoe, also happened to get more or less lost while trying to deliver a warrant. He turned off on an access road to a Southern Union pump site and found the trailer abandoned. The backhoe apparently had been unloaded, driven about twenty yards on its own power, and then rolled up a makeshift ramp--presumably into the back of a truck. The truck had almost new tires on its dual rear wheels. The tread pattern was used by Dayton Tire and Rubber, with a single dealer in Farmington and none in Shiprock. The dealer had no trouble remembering. The only truck tires he sold for a month had been to Farmington U-Haul. The company had three trucks out at the moment with dual rear wheels. Two had been recently reshod with Daytons. One was rented to a Farmington furniture company. The other, equipped with a power winch, was rented to Joe B. Nails, P.O. Box 770, Aztec, using a MasterCard.
Farmington police had a record on Nails. One driving while intoxicated. It was enough to provide an employer's name. Wellserve, Inc., a contractor maintaining the Gasco collection system. But Wellserve was a former employer. Nails had quit in August.
Chee learned all of this good news secondhand. He'd spent the morning hanging around Red Rock, worrying about what he'd tell Janet Pete when she got back from Phoenix, and waiting for a witness he was supposed to deliver to the FBI office in Farmington. With that done two hours behind schedule, he had stopped at the Shiprock headquarters and got the first half of the news about the trailer. He'd spent the afternoon hunting around Teec Nos Pos for a fellow who'd broken his brother-in-law's leg. No luck on that. When he pulled back into Shiprock to knock off for the day, he ran into Benally going off shift.
'I guess we got your Backhoe Bandit,' Benally said. And he filled Chee in on the rest of it. 'U-Haul calls us when he checks the truck in.'
That struck Chee as stupid. 'You think he'll have the backhoe in it when he returns it?' Chee said. 'Otherwise, no proof of anything. What you charge him with?'
Benally had thought of that and so had Captain Largo.
'We bring him in. We tell him we have witnesses who saw him taking the thing out, and we can connect it to the truck he rented, and if he'll cooperate and tell us where it is so we can recover it, and snitch on his buddy, then we go light on him.' Benally shrugged, not thinking it would work either. 'Better than nothing,' he added. 'Anyway, the call's out on the U-Haul truck. Maybe we catch him with the backhoe in it.'
