Chee saw Dashee perched on a folding chair beside one of them, reading something.
Chee walked over. “Hey there, fella,” he said to Dashee. “Are you the Special Agent in Charge?”
“Keep your voice down,” Cowboy said. “I don’t want the feds to know I associate with you. Not until this business is over, anyway. However, the man you want to report to is that tall guy with the black baseball cap with FBI on it. That doesn’t stand for Full Blood Indian.”
“He looks sort of young. Do you think he understands this country?”
Dashee laughed. “Well, he asked me about the trout fishing in the San Juan. He said somebody told him it was great. I think he’s based in St Louis.”
“You tell him fishing was good?”
“Come on, Chee. Ease up. I just told him it was great about two hundred miles upstream before all the muddy irrigation water gets dumped in. He seems like a good guy. Said he was new out here. Didn’t know whether to call a gully an arroyo, or a wash, or a cut, or a creek. His name’s Damon Cabot.”
Up close Damon Cabot looked even younger than he had from the back of the room. He shook hands with Chee, explained that other detachments were handling other aspects of the hunt and that this group was trying to collect all possible evidence from the area where the escape vehicle had been abandoned.
“Here’s where we have you,” he said, pointing to the map spread on the table and indicating a red X near the center of Casa Del Eco Mesa. “That’s our Truck Base. Where the perps abandoned the pickup truck. Are you familiar with that area?”
“Just generally,” Chee said. “I worked mostly out of Shiprock and in the Tuba City district. That’s way west of here.”
“Well, you know it a hell of a lot better than I do,” Cabot said. “I just got reassigned from Philadelphia to Salt Lake City about a week ago. Did you work in that 1998 manhunt?”
Chee nodded.
“From what I’ve been overhearing, the Bureau didn’t add any luster to its reputation with that one.”
Chee shrugged. “Nobody did.”
“What do you think? Are those two guys still out there?”
“From 1998? Who knows? But a lot of people around here think so,” Chee said.
“I guess the Bureau decided they’re dead,” Cabot said. “I just wondered -' He cut that off, and shifted into telling Chee how the fugitives were thought to be armed: assault rifles and perhaps at least one scoped hunting rifle. Chee noticed that Special Agent Cabot seemed slightly downcast. The man had been trying to be friendly. The realization surprised Chee. It made him a bit ashamed of himself.
He brought that up with Cowboy as they drove in the deputy’s patrol car to the meeting place on Casa Del Eco Mesa.
“Exactly what I’ve been telling you,” Cowboy said. “You pick on the feds all the time. Hostile. I think it grows out of your basic and well-justified inferiority complex. There’s a little envy mixed in there, too, I think. Healthy, good-looking guys, blow-dry haircuts, big salaries, good retirement, shiny shoes, Hollywood always making movies about them, heel-e-o-copters to fly around in, flak jackets, expense accounts, retirement pensions and'—Cowboy paused, gave Chee a sidewise glance -'and getting to associate with those real pretty Justice Department public-defender lawyers all the time.”
Which was Cowboy’s effort to open the subject of Janet Pete. Chee had once asked Cowboy to be his best man if Janet insisted on the white people’s style of wedding Janet’s mother wanted instead of the Navajo wedding Chee preferred. He never really explained to Cowboy how that affair had crashed and burned, and he wasn’t going to do it now.
“How about you, Cowboy?” Chee said. “Nobody ever accused you of loving the federals. You’re the one who told me the most popular course in the FBI Academy is Insufferable Arrogance 101.”
“It’s Arrogance 201 that’s popular. They expect recruits to test out of 101. Anyhow, most of them are nice guys. Just a lot richer than us.”
One of them was awaiting them at Truck Base, sitting in a black van, monitoring radio traffic with a book open on the seat beside him. He said the Special Agent running this part of the show had gone down in the canyon, and they were supposed to wait for instructions.
The radio tech pointed to the yellow police-line tape he’d parked beside.
“Don’t go inside that,” he said. “That’s where the perps abandoned their truck. We can’t have people messing that up until the crime-lab team signs off on it.”
