Officer Manuelito had brought his mother’s oldest brother home from the hospital, about how the old man had managed to hold death at bay until he saw sunlight on the mountaintop, how Bernadette had gone to bring Blue Woman’s sisters to help prepare the body for the traditional funeral. Under his uniform Largo was a traditional, a Standing Rock
“I’d give you some time off if I could,” he said, ignoring the fact that Chee was officially still on vacation, 'but you know how it is. We’ve got everybody out looking for those bastards, so I’m just going to give you a minute to get your uniform on, and while you do that I’ll fill you in, and then I want you out there getting things a little better organized.”
“OK,” Chee said.
A sudden and unpleasant thought struck the captain. “Manuelito was with you, then,” Largo said, looking murderous. “She didn’t bother to tell me, though. Did she bother to tell you I was looking all over for you?”
“I didn’t ask her,” Chee said, and busied himself getting his pants on, buttoning his shirt, hoping Largo wouldn’t notice how he’d evaded the question, thinking of nothing to say to take the heat off Bernie, and now, happy to see the captain heading out the door.
“I’ll bring you up to speed in my office,” Largo said. “In exactly thirty minutes.”
Approximately thirty minutes later Chee was sitting in the chair in front of Largo’s desk, listening to the captain’s end of a telephone conversation. “OK,” the captain said. “Sure. I understand. Will do. OK.” He hung up, sighed, looked at Chee and his watch. “All right,” he said. “Here’s the situation.”
Largo was good at it. He named and described the surviving suspects. Nobody was at home at either man’s residence. None of the neighbors had seen either man since before the robbery, which meant absolutely nothing in Ironhand’s case because the nearest neighbor lived about four miles away. A horse trailer and two horses seemed to be missing from Ironhand’s place. Since nobody could guess when or why, that might be equally meaningless. With their airplane-escape theory shot down, the feds had resumed custody of the manhunt operation, roadblocks were up, and trackers were working over the area around the spot where the suspects had abandoned the escape vehicle.
“Pretty much Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey again,” Largo said. “Three sets of state police involved, three sheriff’s departments, probably four, BIA cops, Ute cops, cops over from the Jicarilla Reservation, Immigration and Naturalization is sending up its Border Patrol trackers, federals galore, even Park Service security people. I’m putting you in Montezuma Creek. We have four people up there working with the FBI trying to locate some tracks. You’re reporting to Special Agent'—Largo consulted a notepad on his desk—'named Damon Cabot. I don’t know him.”
“I’ve heard of him,” Chee said. “You remember that old poem: 'The Lodges spoke only to Cabots, and the Cabots spoke only to God.'”
“No, I don’t,” Largo said, 'and I hope you’re not going up there with that smart-aleck attitude.”
Chee looked at his watch. “You want me up there today?”
“I wanted you up there yesterday,” Largo said. “Be careful and keep in touch.”
“OK,” Chee said, and headed for the door.
“And Chee,” Largo said. “Use your head for once. Don’t get crosswise with the Bureau again. Have some manners. Give ’em some respect.”
Chee nodded.
Largo was grinning at him. “If you have trouble giving ‘em respect, just remember they get paid about three times more than you do.”
“Yeah,” Chee said. 'That’ll help.”
The gathering place for the manhunt was the conference room of the Montezuma Creek Chapter House. The parking lot was crowded with a varied assortment of police cars, most easily identified by jurisdiction by Chee. He spotted Cowboy Dashee’s Apache County patrol unit resting off the gravel but under the shade of the lot’s solitary tree, a couple NTP units, two of the shiny black Ford sedans the FBI used and an equally shiny green Land Rover. That, he concluded, would be far too expensive to be owned by any of the nonfederal agencies here. Probably it had been seized in a drug raid and driven down from Salt Lake or Denver by whichever Special Agent had been put in charge of this affair.
The conference room itself was as crowded as the lot and almost as hot. Someone had concluded that the feeble window-mounted air-conditioning unit wasn’t handling the body heat produced by the crowd and had opened windows. A dozen or so men, some in camouflage outfits, some in uniforms, some in suits, were crowded around a table.
