Officer Manuelito brushed a lock of hair off her forehead, leaving a streak of gray mud. Her lips parted with a response, then closed.
“Yes, sir,” she said.
That was all she said. Chee backed the pickup to a rocky place, turned it, and slipped and slid his way back to 5010 in leaden silence. Back on the gravel, he said:
“Did you know that Diamonte filed a complaint against you? Charged you with harassment.” Officer Manuelito was staring out the windshield. “No,” she said. “But I knew he said he was going to.”
“Yep,” Chee said. “He did. Said you were hanging around. Bothering his customers.”
“His dope buyers.”
“Some of them, probably,” Chee said.
Manuelito stared relentlessly out of the windshield.
“What were you doing?” Chee asked.
“You mean besides harassing his customers?”
“Besides that,” Chee said, thinking that the very first thing he would do when they got back to the office was approve this woman’s transfer to anywhere. Preferably to Tuba City, which was about as far as he could get her from Shiprock. He glanced at her, waiting for a reply. She was still focused on the windshield.
“You know what he runs out there?” she said.
“I know what he used to do when I was assigned here before,” Chee said. “In those days he wholesaled booze to the reservation bootleggers, fenced stolen property, handled some marijuana. Things like that. Now I understand he’s branched out into more serious dope.”
“That’s right,” she said. “He still supplies the creeps who push pot and now he’s selling the worse stuff, too.”
“That’s what I always heard,” Chee said. “And most recently from Teddy Begayaye. The kid Begayaye picked up at the community college last week named Diamonte as his source for coke. But then he changed his mind and decided he just couldn’t remember where he got it.”
“I know Diamonte’s selling it.”
“So you bring in your evidence. We take it to the captain, he takes it to the federal prosecutors, or maybe the San Juan County cops, and we put the bastard in jail.”
“Sure,” Manuelito said.
“But we don’t go out there, with no evidence, and harass his customers. There’s a law against it.” Chee sensed that she was no longer staring at the windshield. She was looking at him.
“I heard that you did,” she said. “When you were a cop here before.” Chee felt his face flushing. “Who told you that?”
“Captain Largo told us when we were in recruit training.”
The son of a bitch, Chee thought.
“Largo was using me as a bad example?”
“He didn’t say who did it. But I asked around. People said it was you.”
“It just about got me kicked out of the police,” Chee said. “The same thing could happen to you.”
“I heard it got the place shut down, too,” Manuelito said.
“Yeah, and about the time I got off suspension, he was going full blast again.” 25 of 102
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“Still . . . “ Manuelito said. And let the thought trail off.
“Don’t say ‘still.’ You stay away from there. It’s Begayaye’s job, looking into the dope situation. If you run across anything useful, tell Teddy. Or tell me. Don’t go freelancing around.”
“Yes, sir,” Manuelito said, sounding very formal.
“I mean it,” Chee said. “I’ll put a letter in your file reporting these instructions.”
“Yes, sir,” Manuelito said.
“Now. What’s this transfer request about? What’s wrong with Shiprock? And where do you want to go?”
“I don’t care. Anywhere.”
That surprised Chee. He’d guessed Manuelito wanted to be closer to a boyfriend somewhere. Or that her mother was sick.
Something like that. But now he remembered that she was from Red Rock. By Big Rez standards, Shiprock was conveniently close to her family.
“Is there something about Shiprock you don’t like?”
That question produced a long silence, and finally:
“I just want to get away from here.”
“Why?”
