Hunting Badger
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ALSO BY TONY HILLERMAN
The First Eagle
The Fallen Man
Finding Moon
Sacred Clowns
Coyote Waits
Talking God
A Thief of Time
Skinwalkers
The Dark Wind
People of Darknesss
Listening Women
Dance Hall of the Dead
The Fly on the Wall
The Blessing Way
HarperCollinsPublishers
85 Fulham Palace Road
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.fireandwater.com
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2000
1. 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Copyright © Tony Hillerman
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 00 226199 5
Set in Linotype Postscript Goudy
Typeset by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd,
Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Omnia Books Limited, Glasgow
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
For Officer Dale Claxton
Who died doing his duty, bravely and alone
AUTHOR'S NOTE
On May 4, 1998, Officer Dale Claxton of the Cortez, Colorado, police stopped a stolen water truck. Three men in it killed him with a fusillade of automatic weapons fire. In the chase ensuing, three other officers were wounded, one of the suspects killed himself, and the two survivors vanished into the vast, empty wilderness of mountains, mesas, and canyons on the Utah-Arizona border. The Federal Bureau of Investigation took over the manhunt. Soon it involved over five hundred officers from at least twenty federal, state, and tribal agencies, and bounty hunters attracted by a $250,000 FBI reward offer.
To quote Leonard Butler, the astute Chief of Navajo Tribal Police, the search “became a circus.” Sighting reports sent to the coordinator were not reaching search teams. Search parties found themselves tracking one another, unable to communicate on mismatched radio frequencies, local police who knew the country sat at roadblocks while teams brought in from the cities were floundering in canyons strange to them. The town of Bluff was evacuated, a brush fire was set in the San Juan bottoms to smoke out the fugitives, and the hunt dragged on into the summer. The word spread in July that the FBI believed the fugitives dead (possibly of laughter, one of my cop friends said). By August, only the Navajo Police still had scouts out looking for signs.
As I write this (July 1999) the fugitives remain free. But the hunt of 1998 exists in this book only as the fictional memory of fictional characters.
—TONY HILLERMAN
The characters in this book are fictional with the exception of Patti (P.J.) Collins and the Environmental Protection Agency survey team. My thanks to Ms Collins for providing information about this radiation-mapping job, and to P.J. and the copter crew for giving Chee a ride up Gothic Canyon.
Chapter One
Deputy Sheriff Teddy Bai had been leaning on the doorframe looking out at the night about three minutes or so before he became aware that Cap Stoner was watching him.
“Just getting some air,” Bai said. “Too damn much cigarette smoke in there.”
“You’re edgy tonight,” Cap said, moving up to stand in the doorway beside him. “You young single fellas ain’t supposed to have anything worrying you.”
