away their location.”
“It used to work in India when the nabobs were hunting tigers,” Cree said. “Only they did it with beaters instead of deputy sheriffs. They’d send those guys in to provoke the animals.”
“I thought they used goats.”
“That was later,” Chee said. “After the beaters joined the union. Now why not tell me why we’re stopping here.”
“High ground. You can see the lay of the land from here.“ Dashee pointed northeast. “Up there, maybe three miles, is the Timms place. You can’t see it because it’s beyond that ridge, down a slope.' He pointed again. “This road we’re on angles along the rim of the mesa over Gothic Creek, then swings back past the Timms place, and then sort of peters out at a widow woman’s ranch up toward the San Juan. That’s the end of it. The truck was abandoned about a mile and a half up ahead.”
Chee hoisted himself onto the front fender. “All I know about this case is what I’ve heard since I got home. Fill me in. What’s the official Theory of the Crime?”
Dashee grinned. “You think the feds would tell an Apache County deputy?”
“No. But somebody in the Denver FBI, or maybe the Salt Lake office, or Phoenix, or Albuquerque, fills in some state-level cop, and he tells somebody else, and the word spreads and pretty soon somebody else tells your sheriff, and —' Chee made an all-encompassing gesture. “So everybody knows in about three hours, and the federals maintain their deniability.”
“OK,” Dashee said. “What we hear goes like this. This Teddy Bai fella, the one the FBI is holding at the Farmington hospital, he tells some of the wrong people how easy it would be to rob the Ute Casino, and the word gets back to some medium-level hoods. Maybe Las Vegas hoods, maybe Los Angeles. I’ve heard it both ways, and it’s just guesswork. Anyway, the theory is Bai gets contacted. He’s offered a slice if he’ll help with the details, like getting the timing just right, all the inside stuff they need to know. Who’s on guard when. When the bank truck comes. How to cut off the power, telephones, so forth. Bai is a flier, he tells them that Timms has this old army short-takeoff recon airplane they can grab for the getaway. He’ll fly it for them. But they know that Bai’s local. He’ll be missed. He’ll be the way the hoods planning this can be traced. So they bring along their own pilot, shoot Bai, drive out to the Timms place, tear up the pickup truck so the cops will think they had to abandon it out here, steal the plane and'—(Dashee flapped his arms)—'away they go.”
Chee nodded.
“You’re thinking about Timms,” Dashee said. “The theory is they planned to kill him, too. That would have given them more time. But he wasn’t home. On his way home Timms heard about the robbery on the news and then found the lock on his barn busted, and his airplane gone, and he notified the cops. And since we’re closest, we got sent to check it out.”
Chee nodded again.
“You don’t like that, either?”
“I’m just thinking,” Chee said. “Show me where they left the truck.”
Doing that took them into the rugged, stony treeless territory where no one except surveyors seems to know exactly where Arizona ends and Utah begins. It involved a descent on a bad dirt road from the mesa top and took them past a flat expanse of drought-dwarfed sage where a white tanker truck was parked with its door open and a man sitting in the front seat reading something.
Dashee waved at him. “Rosie Rosner,” Dashee said. “Claims he has the easiest job in North America. Even easier than being a deputy. Three or four times a day an Environmental Protection Agency copter flies in here, he refuels it, and then nods off again until it comes back.”
“I think I saw that copter at the Farmington Airport,” Chee said. “Guy there said they’re locating abandoned uranium mines. Looking for radioactive dumps.”
“I asked the guy if he’d seen our bandidos driving in,” Dashee said. “But no such luck. They started doing this the next day.”
Dashee honked at the driver and waved. “Come to think of it, I guess the timing was pretty lucky for him.”
About a mile beyond the refueling truck Dashee stopped again and got out.
“Take a look at this.“ He pointed to a black outcrop of basalt beside the track, partly hidden by an outstretched limb of a four-wing salt bush and a collection of tumbleweeds.
“Here’s where they banged up their oil pan on the truck,” he said. “Either they didn’t know the road, or they weren’t paying attention or they swerved just a little bit to do it on purpose.”
