to check out that old mine.”
“I always wonder why you don’t have a cell phone. Don’t they work well out here?”
“Until I quit being a cop I had a radio in my vehicle,” Leaphorn said. “When I quit being a cop, I didn’t have anybody to call.'
Which sounded sort of sad to Louisa. “What’s this about a mine?” she asked, as they got back into the vehicle.
“Maybe I didn’t mention that,” Leaphorn said. “Chee was looking for an old Mormon coal mine, abandoned in the nineteenth century that maybe had a canyon entrance and another one from the top of the mesa. Where they could lift the coal out without climbing out of the canyon carrying it. I thought that might have been the hideout of Ironhand’s dad. It would explain that business Old Lady Bashe was telling you about him disappearing in the canyon and reappearing on top.”
“Yes,” Louisa said. “You’re thinking that’s where those two are hiding now?”
“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “Just a possibility.' He turned the truck left, down the bumpy dirt road and away from the highway. “This is rough going,” he said. “But if you don’t break something, its only about nine miles this way. If you go around by the highway, it’s almost thirty.”
“Which tells me you’re in a hurry to make this telephone call. You want to tell me why?”
“I want to make sure he told the FBI,” Leaphorn said, and laughed. “He’s awful touchy about the Bureau. Gets his feelings hurt. And if he did tell them, I want to find out if they followed up on it.”
Louisa waited, glanced at him, braced herself as the truck crossed a rocky washout and tilted down the slope.
“That doesn’t tell me why you’re worried. All of a sudden.”
“Because I’m remembering how interested Gershwin was in the location of that mine.”
She thought about that. “It seems reasonable. If somebody threatens you, you’re going to wonder where they’re hanging out.”
“Right,” Leaphorn said. “Probably nothing to worry about.”
But he didn’t slow down.
Chapter Twenty-five
Sergeant Jim Chee was in his house-trailer home, sprawled in his chair with his foot perched on a pillow on his bunk and a Ziploc bag full of crushed ice draped over his ankle. Bernadette Manuelito was at the stove preparing a pot of coffee and being very quiet about it because Chee wasn’t in the mood for conversation or anything else.
He had gone over everything that had happened in Largo’s office, suffered again the humiliation of Cabot handing him his photos of the mine, Cabot’s snide smile, being more or less dismissed by Captain Largo, slinking out of the room without a shred of dignity left. And then, his head full of outrage, indignation and self-disgust, not paying attention to where the hell he was walking, losing his balance tripping over something in the parking lot, and coming down full weight on his sprained ankle and dumping himself full length on the gravel.
And of course a swarm of the various sorts of cops working on the casino hunt had been there to see this—two of his NTP officers reporting in, the division radio gal coming out, three or four Border Patrol trackers up from El Paso, a BIA cop he’d once worked with, and a couple of the immense over-supply of FBI agents standing around picking their noses and waiting for Cabot to emerge. And of course, when he was pushing himself up—awkwardly trying to keep any pressure off the ankle—there was Bernie taking his arm.
And now here was Bernie in his trailer, puttering with his coffeepot. Largo had emerged and, despite Chee’s objections, had dispatched Bernie to take him to the clinic to have the ankle looked after. She had done that, and brought him home, and now it was past quitting time for her shift but here she was anyway, measuring the coffee on her own time.
And looking pretty as she did it. He resisted thinking about that, unwilling to diminish the self-pity he was enjoying. But looking at her, as neat from the rear elevation as from the front, reminded him that he was comparing her with Janet Pete. She lacked Janet’s high-gloss glamour, her physical perfection (depending, however, on how one rated that) and her sophistication. Again, how did one rate sophistication? Did you rate it by the standards of the Ivy League, Stanford and the rest of the politically correct privileged class, or by the Chuska Mountain sheep-camp society, where sophistication required the deeper and more difficult knowledge of how one walked in beauty, content in a difficult world? Such thoughts were causing Chee to feel better, and he turned his mind hurriedly back to the memory of Cabot returning his photographs, thereby restoking his anger.
Just then the telephone rang. It was the Legendary Lieutenant himself—the very one whose notions about Ute tribal legends was at the root of this humiliation.
