“Oh?”
“I told her you were on vacation. Just back from going fishing up in Alaska.”
“Uh, what did she say to that?”
“She just sort of laughed. And she said she’d heard you had a hand in finding that airplane. Said she guessed you must have been doing that on your own time. I hadn’t talked to Cowboy yet, and I didn’t know about that, so I just said, well anyway you hadn’t gone back to work yet. And she laughed again, and said she thought getting egg on the FBI’s face had become sort of a hobby with you.”
Chee picked up his hat. “It’s not,” he said. “Lot of good people in the Bureau. It’s just they let the FBI get way too big. And the politicians get the promotions, and so they’re the ones making the policies and calling the shots instead of the bright ones. And so a lot of stupid things happen.”
“Like evacuating Bluff in that big manhunt of ninety-eight,” Bernie said.
Chee held the door open for her.
Bernie stood there looking at him, in no hurry to leave.
“Would you like to go along?” Chee asked. “Go see Hosteen Nakai with me?”
Bernie’s expression said she would.
“Could I help?”
“Maybe. Be good company anyway. And you could bring me up to date on what I’ve been missing here.”
But Bernie wasn’t very good company. As soon as she climbed into his pickup and shut the door behind her, he said, “You mentioned Janet asked about me at the hospital. What else did she say?”
Bernie looked at him a moment. “About you?”
“Yeah,” Chee said, wishing he hadn’t asked that question.
She thought for a moment, either about what Janet Pete had said about him, or about what she was willing to tell him.
“Just what I told you already, about you liking to embarrass the FBI,” she said.
After that there wasn’t much talking during the thirty-mile drive to the hospital.
Visiting hours were almost over when they pulled into the parking lot, and the traffic was mostly outgoing.
“I was noticing faces,” Bernie said. “The ones who had good news and the ones who didn’t. Not many of them looked happy.”
“Yeah,” Chee said, thinking of how he could apologize to Hosteen Nakai for neglecting him, trying to come up with the right words.
“Hospitals are always so sad,” Bernie said. “Except for the maternity ward.”
It took only a glance at the nurse manning the desk on the floor housing the Intensive Care ward to support Bernie’s observation. She was talking on a desk telephone, a graying, middle-aged woman whose face and voice reflected sorrow.
“Did he say when? OK.' She glanced up at Chee and Bernie, gave the 'just a moment' signal, and said, 'When he checks in tell him the Morris boy died.' She hung up, made a wry face, and replaced it with a question.
“We’ve come to see Mr Frank Sam Nakai,” Chee said.
“He may not be awake,” she said, and glanced at the clock. “Visiting hours end at eight. You’ll have to make it brief.”
“He sent a message,” Chee said. “He asked me to come right away.”
“Let’s see then,” she said, and led them down the hall.
It was hard to tell whether Nakai was awake, or even alive. Much of his face was covered with a breathing mask, and he lay absolutely still.
“I think he’s sleeping,” Bernie said, and as she said it, Nakai’s eyes opened. He turned his face toward them and removed the mask.
“Long Thinker has come,” he said, in Navajo and in a voice almost too weak to be audible.
“Yes, Little Father,” Chee said. “I am here. I should have come long ago.”
A slender translucent tube connected Hosteen Nakai to a plastic container hung on a bedside stand. Nakai’s fingers followed the tube
