“So we’d think they abandoned the truck because they didn’t have any choice,” Chee said.
“Maybe. You’d see they didn’t drive it much farther.”
After another few hundred yards Dashee turned off the packed earth of the unimproved road into an even vaguer track. He rolled the patrol car down a slope into a place where humps of blown sand supported a growth of Mormon tea and a few scraggly junipers.
“Here we are,” he said. “I’m parking just about exactly where they left the pickup.”
Chee climbed one of the mounds, looked down at the place the truck had been and all around.
“Could you see the truck from the track? Just driving past?”
“If you knew where to look,” Dashee said. “And Timms would have noticed the oil leak, and the tracks turning off. He would have been looking.”
“You find any tracks?”
“Sure,” Dashee said. “Both sides of the truck where they got out. Two sets. Then somebody told the feds, and here comes the copters full of the city boys in their bulletproof suits.”
“The copters blew away the tracks?”
Dashee nodded. “Just like they did it for us in the ‘98 business. When I called it in, I asked ’em to warn the feds about that.” Dashee laughed. “They said that’d be like trying to tell the pope how to hear confessions. Anyway, the light wasn’t too bad, and I took a roll of photographs. Boot prints and the places they put stuff they unloaded.”
“Like what?”
“Mark left by a rifle butt. Something that might have been a box. Big sack. So forth.“ Dashee shrugged.
Chee laughed. “Like a sack full of Ute Casino money, maybe. By the way, how much did they get?”
“An “undetermined amount,” according to the FBI. But the unofficial and approximate estimate I hear it was four hundred and eighty-six thousand, nine hundred and eleven dollars.”
Chee whistled.
“All unmarked money, of course,” Dashee added. “And lots of pockets full of big-value chips which honest folks grabbed off the roulette tables while escaping in the darkness.”
“Did the tracks head right off toward the Timms place? Or where?”
“We didn’t have much time to look. The sheriff called right back and said the FBI wanted us not to mess around the scene. Just back off and guard the place.”
“Not much time to look, huh?” Chee said. “What did you see when you did look? What was in the truck?”
“Nothing much. They’d stolen it off of one of those Mobil Oil pump jack sites, and it had some of those greasy wrenches, wipe rags, empty beer cans, hamburger wrappers, so forth. Stuff left under the seats and on the floorboards. Girlie magazine in a door side pocket, receipts for some gas purchases.“ Dashee shrugged. “About what you’d expect.”
“Anything in the truck bed?”
“We thought we had something there,” Dashee said. “A good-as-new-looking transistor radio there on the truck bed. Looked expensive, too.“ He shrugged. “But it was broken.”
“Broken. It wouldn’t play?”
“Not a sound,” Dashee said. “Maybe the battery was down. Maybe it broke when whoever threw it back there.”
“More likely they threw it back there because it was already broken,” Chee said. He was staring westward, down into the wash, and past it into the broken Utah border country, the labyrinth of canyons and mesa where the Navajo Tribal Police, and police from a score of other state, federal and county agencies had searched for the killers in the ’98 manhunt.
“You know, Cowboy,” Chee said, ”I’ve got a feeling we’re a little bit north of your jurisdiction here. I think Apache County and Arizona stopped a mile or two back there and we’re in Utah.”
“Who cares?” Dashee said. “What’s more interesting is you can’t see Timms place from here. It’s maybe a mile down the track.”
“Let’s go take a look,” Chee said.
It was, judging by the police car odometer, 1.3 miles. The road wandered down a slope into a sagebrush flat, to a pitched-roof stone house and a cluster of outbuildings. A plank barn with a red tar-paper
