Bernie—Mrs. D. sounding . cheerful, Ms. Manuelito sounding sad. As for Chee, he felt repentant. He hated hurting Bernie's feelings.
When he returned from the coordination meeting about sundown, his in basket held a report from Mrs. Dineyahze with a note clipped to it. The report assured him that the right people in the state police and highway patrols of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado now had all the needed data on the missing Jeep. More important, they knew why it was needed. A brother cop had been killed. Finding that Jeep was part of the investigation. The same information had gone to police departments in reservation border towns and to sheriff's offices in relevant county seats.
Chee leaned back in his chair, feeling better. If that Jeep was rolling down a highway anywhere in the Four Corners there was a fair chance it would be spotted. If a city cop saw it parked somewhere, there was a good chance the license plate would be checked. He unclipped the note, which was handwritten. By Mrs. Dineyahze's standards, untyped meant unofficial.
'Lt. Chee: Bernie called the Arizona State motor pool and got all the specifications on the Jeep. It had been impounded in a drug bust and had a lot of fancy add-ons, which are listed below. Also note battery and tire types, rims, other things that Bernie thought might turn up at pawnshops, etc. She relayed the list to shops in Gallup, Flag, Farmington, etc., and also called Thrift-way people in Phoenix and asked them to ask their stores on reservation to be alert.' This was signed 'C. Dineyahze.'
Far below this signature, which made it not only unofficial but off the record, Mrs. Dineyahze had scrawled: 'Bernie is a good girl.'
Chee already knew that. He liked her. He admired her. He thought she was a very neat lady. But he also knew that Bernadette Manuelito had a crush on him, and almost everybody else in the extended family of the Navajo Tribal Police seemed to know it, too. That made Bernie a pain in the neck. In fact, that was how Chee, who wasn't very good at understanding women, had come to notice Bernie had her eye on him. He'd started being kidded about it.
But there was no time to think of that now. Nor about her idea—which was smart. If the Jeep had been abandoned somewhere on the Big Rez or in the border country, the odds were fairly good that it would be stripped—especially since it had been loaded with expensive, easily stolen stuff. Now he was hungry and tired. None of the frozen dinners awaiting him in the little refrigerator in his trailer home had any appeal for him tonight. He'd go by the Kentucky Fried Chicken place, pick up a dinner with biscuits and gravy, go home, dine, kick back, finish
He was finishing a thigh and the second biscuit when the phone rang.
'You said to call you if anything turned up on the Jeep,' the dispatcher said.
'Like what?'
'Like a guy came into the filling station at, Cedar Ridge last Monday and tried to sell the clerk a radio and tape player. It was the same brand that was in that Jeep.
'They have an identification?'
'The clerk said it was a kid from a family named Pooacha. They have a place over on Shinume Wash.'
'Okay,' Chee said. 'Thanks.' He looked at his watch. It would have to wait until morning. By midafternoon the next day the Jeep was found. If you discount driving about two hundred miles back and forth, and some of it over roads far too primitive even to be listed as primitive on Chee's AAA Indian Country road map, the whole project proved to be remarkably easy.
Since Officer Manuelito had provided the idea that made it possible, and had the day off anyway, Chee could think of no way to discourage Bernie from coming along. In fact, he didn't even try. He enjoyed her company when she had her mind on business instead of on him. They drove first to the Cedar Ridge trading post, talked to the clerk there, learned the would-be radio salesman was a young man named Tommy Tsi, and got directions to the Pooacha place, where he lived. They took the dusty washboard gravel of Navajo Route 6110 westward to Blue Moon Bench, turned south on the even rougher Route 6120 along Bekihatso Wash, and found the track that wandered through the rocks and saltbush to the Pooacha establishment.
At this intersection a cracked old boot was stuck atop the post beside the cattle guard.
'Well, good,' said Bernie, pointing to the boot. 'Somebody's home.'
'Somebody is,' Chee agreed, 'unless the last one out forgot to take the boot down. And in my experience, when the road's as bad as this one, the somebody who's there isn't the one you're looking for.'
But Tommy Tsi, a very young Pooacha son-in-law, was home—and very nervous when he noticed the uniform. Chee was wearing and the Navajo Tribal Police on his car. No, he didn't still have the radio and tape player. It belonged to a friend who had asked him to try to sell it for him. The friend had reclaimed it, Tsi said, rubbing his hand uneasily over a very sparse mustache as he spoke.
'Give us the friend's name,' Chee said. 'Where can we locate him?'
'His name?' Tommy Tsi said. And thought awhile. 'Well, he's not exactly a close friend. I met him in Flag. I think they call him Shorty. Or something like that.'
'And how were you going to get his money back to him when you sold his stuff?'
'Well,' Tommy Tsi said. And hesitated again. 'I'm not sure.'
'That's a shame,' Bernie said. 'If you could find him we want you to tell him we're not much interested in the radio stuff. We want to find the Jeep. If he can show us where the Jeep is, then he gets to collect the reward.'
'Reward? For the Jeep?'
'A thousand bucks,' Bernie said. 'Twenty fifty-dollar bills. The family of the woman who was driving the Jeep put it up.'
'Really,' Tsi said. 'A thousand bucks.'
'For finding the Jeep. That's what this guy did, you know. Found an abandoned vehicle. No law against that, is there?'
'Right,' Tommy Tsi agreed, nodding and looking much more cheerful.
