“What’d he want?” It was actually former lieutenant Leaphorn now. The old man had retired last summer. Finally. After about a century. Still, retired or not, hearing that Leaphorn was looking for him made Chee feel uneasy and begin examining his conscience.
He’d spent too many years working for the man.
“He just said he’d catch you later,” Alice said. “You sound like you had a bad day.”
“Just a total blank,” Chee agreed. But that wasn’t accurate. It was worse than blank. First there had been the episode with the kid in the Ute Mountain Tribal Police uniform (Chee balked at thinking of him as a policeman), and then there was Mrs. Twosalt.
Cocky kid. Chee had been parked high on the slope below Popping Rock where his truck was screened from view by brush and he had a long view of the oil field roads below. He’d been watching a mud-spattered blue two-ton GMC pickup parked at a cattle guard about a mile below him. Chee had dug out his binoculars and focused them, and was trying to determine why the driver had parked there and if anyone was sitting on the passenger’s side. All he was seeing was dirt on the windshield.
About then the kid had said
in a loud voice, and when Chee had turned, there he was, about six feet away, staring at him through dark and shiny sunglasses.
“What’s you doing?” the kid had asked, and Chee had recognized that he was wearing what looked like a brand-new Ute Mountain Tribal Police uniform.
“I’m watching birds,” Chee said, and tapped the binoculars.
Which the kid hadn’t found amusing.
“Let’s see some identification,” he’d said. That was all right with Chee. It was proper procedure when you run across something that maybe looks suspicious. He’d fished out his Navajo Tribal Police identification folder, wishing he hadn’t made the smart-aleck remark about bird-watching. It was just the sort of wisecrack cops heard every day and resented. He wouldn’t have done it, he thought, if the kid hadn’t sneaked up on him so efficiently. That was embarrassing.
The kid looked at the folder, from Chee’s photograph to Chee’s face. Neither seemed to please him.
“Navajo police?” he’d said. “What’s you doing out here on the Ute reservation?” And then Chee politely explained to the kid that they weren’t on the Ute reservation. They were on Navajo land, the border being maybe a half mile or so east of them. And the kid had sort of smirked and said Chee was lost, the border was at least a mile the other way, and he’d pointed down the slope. The argument that might have started would have been totally pointless, so Chee had said good-bye and climbed back into his truck. He had driven away, thoroughly pissed off, remembering that the Utes were the enemy in a lot of Navajo mythology and understanding why. He was also thinking he had handled that encounter very poorly for an acting lieutenant, which he had been now for almost three weeks. And that led him to think of Janet Pete, who was why he’d worked for this promotion. Thinking of Janet always cheered him up a little. The day would surely get better.
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15/03/2008 19:57
TheFallenMan
file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Floop/Local%20Settings/Te...
It didn’t. Next came Old Lady Twosalt.
Just like the Ute cop, she’d walked right up behind him without him hearing a thing. She caught him standing in the door of the school bus parked beside the Twosalt hogan, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do but continue standing there, stammering and stuttering, explaining that he’d honked his horn, and waited around and hollered, and did all the polite things one does to protect another’s privacy when one visits a house in mostly empty country. And then he’d finally decided that nobody was home. Finally, too, he stopped talking.
Mrs. Twosalt had just stood there, looking politely away from him while he talked instead of looking into his eyes—which is the traditional Navajo way of suggesting disbelief. And when he’d finally finished, she went right to the heart of it.
“I was out looking after the goats,” she said. “But what are you looking for in my school bus? You think you lost something in there, or what?”
What Chee was looking for in the school bus was some trace of cow manure, or cow hair, or wool, or any other evidence that the vehicle had been used to haul animals other than schoolkids. It involved the same problem that had him peering through his binoculars at the big pickup over by Popping Rock. Cattle were disappearing from grazing land in the jurisdiction of the Shiprock agency, and Captain Largo had made stopping this thievery the first priority of Chee’s criminal investigation division. He put it ahead of dope dealing at the junior college, a gang shooting, bootlegging, and other crimes that Chee felt were more interesting.
He’d rolled out of the cot in his trailer house in the cold dawn this morning, put on his jeans and work jacket, and fired up the old truck intending to spend the day incognito, just prowling around looking for the kind of vehicles into which those cattle might be disappearing.
The GMC pickup was a natural. It was a fifth-wheel model designed to pull heavy trailers and known to be favored by serious rustlers who like to do their stealing in wholesale, trailer-load lots. But he’d just happened to notice the school bus while jolting down the trail from Popping Rock, and just happened to remember the Twosalt outfit not only raised cattle but had a shaky reputation, and just happened to wonder what they would want with an old school bus anyway. None of that helped him come up with the answer for which Mrs. Twosalt had stood there waiting.
“I was just curious,” Chee said. “I used to ride one of these things to school when I was a kid. I was wondering if they’d changed them any.” He produced a weak laugh.
Mrs. Twosalt hadn’t seemed to share his amusement. She waited, looked at him, waited some more—giving him a chance to change his story and to offer a more plausible explanation for this visit.
In default of a better idea, Chee had fished out his identification folder. He’d said he’d come by to learn if the Twosalts were missing any cattle or sheep or had seen anything suspicious. Mrs. Twosalt said she kept good track of all their animals. Nothing was missing. And that had been the end of that except for the lingering embarrassment.
It was almost dark as he topped the hill and looked down at the scattering of lights of Shiprock town. No sign of
