He thinks she told you where to find them. Therefore, I'd appreciate it, you'd win my gratitude and a ride to wherever you want to go, if you'll just tell me all of it. Whether or not you think it matters.'
Nakai waited awhile, making sure Chee's outburst was finished.
'What matters isn't much,' he said. 'Let me remember a minute or two.'
Behind Nakai the sunset had darkened from glowing pale copper to dark copper. Against that gaudy backdrop, two streaks of clouds were painted, blue-black and ragged. To the left, a three-quarter moon hung in the sky like a carved white rock.
'You want her words,' Nakai said. 'What she said, what he said, what she said. I don't remember that well. But I remember some impressions. One. She was thinking about very specific ruins. She'd been there. She knew what it looked like. Two. It was illegal. Better than that, it was on the Navajo Reservation. She good as said that. I remember I said something about it being illegal, and she said maybe it shouldn't be. I was a Navajo and it was Navajo land.'
Nakai stopped. 'How about the ride?'
'What else?'
'That's all I know, really. Did I say it was in a canyon? I'm sure it was. She said she'd been told about it. Didn't say who told her. Somebody she'd bought a pot from, I guess. Anyway, the way she described the place it had to be a canyon. Three ruins, she said. One down by the streambed in the talus, one on the shelf above it, and a third one out of sight in the cliff above the shelf. So that would have to be in a canyon. And that's all I know.'
'Not the name of the canyon.'
'She didn't know it. Said she didn't think it had one. Canyon sin nombre.' Nakai laughed. 'She didn't tell me much, really. Just that she was very, very interested in pots, or potsherds, even little fragments, but only if they had this pinkish glaze with the wavy light lines and the serration. Said she'd triple her price for them. That she wanted to know exactly where they came from. I wondered why she didn't go try to find the place herself. I guess she didn't want to risk getting caught at it.'
'Leaphorn thinks she went. Or, I think he does.'
'Now,' Nakai said, 'I earned my ride.'
Chee took him to a hogan built on the slope of a wash that drained into Gothic Creek--using three-quarters of an hour to cover less than eight jarring miles. It was almost full dark when they pulled onto the slick rock surface that formed the hogan yard, but the moon was bright enough to show why the site had been picked. A growth of cottonwoods, tamarisks, and rabbitbrush at the lip of the wash showed where a spring flowed. It was probably the only live water within thirty miles, Chee guessed, and it wasn't lively enough to support a family in the dry season. A row of rusty water barrels on a wooden rack told him that. Chee parked, raced the pickup engine to make sure the hogan's occupants had noticed their arrival, and turned off the engine. A dim light, probably from a kerosene lamp, showed through the side window. The smell of sheep, a smell that always provoked nostalgia in Chee, drifted down from a brush compound behind the house.
'You have another little problem now,' Chee said.
'What?'
'This brother of yours who lives here. He steals pots for you. You want to tell him about Etcitty, and Nails, and Houk. You want to tell him to be careful--that somebody's shooting pot hunters. But I'm a cop so you don't want me to hear it.'
Nakai said nothing.
'No car. No truck. At least I don't see one. Or see any place to put one on this flat rock where I couldn't see it. So somebody who lives here has gone off with the truck.'
Nakai said nothing. He drew in a breath and exhaled it.
'So if I just leave you here, as you'd intended, then you're stuck. No gas and no ride to where you can get some.'
'One of his sons probably has the truck,' Nakai said. 'He probably keeps some gasoline here somewhere. At least a five-gallon can.'
'In which case you walk that eight miles back to the Caddy with it,' Chee said. 'Or maybe he doesn't have any gas.'
A blanket hanging over the hogan doorway swung aside. The shape of a man appeared, looking out at them.
'What do you have in mind?' Nakai said.
'You quit playing the game. I'm not going to arrest anyone for stealing pots. But I gotta find out where they came from. That's all I care about. If you don't know where that is, this Paiute Clan man here does. Let him tell me. No more games.'
The Paiute Clan man was called Amos Whistler. A skinny man with four of his lower front teeth missing. He knew where the pots had come from. 'Way over there, toward the west. Toward Navajo Mountain,' he said, indicating the direction. 'Maybe thirty miles across the Nokaito Bench.' But there were no roads, just broken country, sandstone cut by one wash after another. Whistler said he had heard about the ruins years ago from an uncle, who told him to stay out of the place because the ghosts were bad in there. But he had learned about Jesus, and he didn't believe in ghosts, so he packed in with a couple of horses, but it was tough going. An ordeal. He'd lost a horse. A good one.
Chee owned an excellent U.S. Geological Survey map of the Big Reservation, a book in which each page showed everything in a thirty-two-mile square. 'What's the name of the canyon?'
'I don't know if it has a name,' Amos Whistler said. 'Around here they say its name is Canyon Where Watersprinkler Plays His Flute.' It was a long name in Navajo, and Whistler looked embarrassed when he said it.
'Would you take me in there? Rent the horses and lead me in?'
'No,' Amos Whistler said. 'I don't go there no more.'
