Now, as he filled his bowl and poured his coffee, what he was hearing on the early news made him feel even better. His fear—his downright dread that he’d soon be involved in another FBI-directed backcountry manhunt was being erased. The TV announcer was speaking ‘live’ from the Federal Courthouse, reporting that the bad guys who had robbed the casino on the Southern Ute Reservation about the time Chee was leaving Fairbanks, were now ‘probably several hundred miles away.'
In other words, safely out of Shiprock’s Four Corners territory and too far away to be his problem.
The theory of the crime the FBI had hung on this robbery, as the handsome young TV employee was now reporting on the seventeen-inch screen in Chee’s trailer, went like this: ‘Sources involved in the hunt said the three bandits had stolen a small single-engine aircraft from a ranch south of Montezuma Creek, Utah. Efforts to trace the plane are under way, and the FBI asked anyone who might have seen the plane yesterday or this morning to call the FBI.'
Chee sampled the stew, sipped coffee and listened to the announcer describe the plane—an elderly dark blue single-engine high-wing monoplane—a type used by the U.S. Army for scouting and artillery spotting in Korea and the early years of the Vietnam War. The sources quoted suggested the robbers had taken the aircraft from the rancher’s hangar and used it to flee the area.
That sounded good to Chee. The farther the better. Canada would be fine, or Mexico. Anywhere but the Four Corners. In the spring of 1998 he’d been involved in an exhausting, frustrating FBI
directed manhunt for two cop killers. At its chaotic worst, officers from more than twenty federal, state, county and reservation agencies had floundered around for weeks in that one with no arrests made before the federals decided to call it off by declaring the suspects ‘probably dead.' It wasn’t an experience Chee wanted to repeat.
The little hatch Chee had cut into the bottom of the trailer door clattered behind him on its rubber hinges, which meant his cat was making an unusually early visit. That told Chee that a coyote was close enough to make Cat nervous or a visitor was coming. Chee listened. Over the sound of the television, now selling a cell-telephone service, he heard wheels on the dirt track that connected his home under the San Juan River cottonwoods to the Shiprock-Cortez highway above.
Who would it be? Maybe Cowboy Dashee, but this wasn’t Cowboy’s usual day off from his deputy sheriff’s job. Chee swallowed another bite of stew, went to the door and pulled back the curtain. A fairly new Ford 150 pickup rolled to a stop under the nearest tree. Officer Bernadette Manuelito was sitting in it, staring straight ahead. Waiting, Navajo fashion, for him to recognize her arrival.
Chee sighed. He was not ready for Bernie. Bernie represented something he’d have to deal with sooner or later, but he preferred later. The gossip in the small world of cops had it that Bernie had a crush on him. Probably true, but not something he wanted to think about now. He’d wanted some time. Time to adjust to the joy of being demoted from acting lieutenant back to sergeant. Time to get over the numbness of knowing he’d finally burned the bridge that had on its other end Janet Pete -seductive, smart, chic, sweet and treacherous. He wasn’t ready for another problem. But he opened the door.
Officer Manuelito seemed to be off-duty. She climbed out of her truck wearing jeans, boots, a red shirt and a Cleveland Indians baseball cap and looking small, pretty and slightly untidy, just as he remembered her. But somber. Even her smile had a sad edge to it. Instead of the joke he had ready for her, Chee simply invited her in, gesturing to his chair beside the table. He sat on the edge of his cot and waited.
“Welcome back to Shiprock,” Bernie said.
“Happy to escape from Tuba,” Chee said. “How’s your mother?”
“About the same,” Bernie said. Last winter, her mother’s drift into the dark mists of Alzheimer’s disease won Officer Manuelito a transfer back to Shiprock, where she could better care for her. Chee’s was a late-summer transfer, caused by his reversion from acting lieutenant to sergeant. The Tuba City section didn’t need another sergeant. Shiprock did.
“Terrible disease,” Chee said.
Bernie nodded. Glanced at him. Looked away.
“I heard you went up to Alaska,” Bernie said. “How was it?”
“Impressive. Took the cruise up the coast.“ He waited. Bernie hadn’t made this call to hear about his vacation.
“I don’t know how to do this,” she said, giving him a sidelong glance.
“Do what?” Chee asked.
“You don’t have anything to do with that casino thing, do you?”
Chee felt trouble coming. “No,” he said.
“Anyway, I need some advice.”
