Chapter Twenty-Six
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Lorenzo perez was in his front yard holding a garden hose with a high-pressure nozzle when Leaphorn drove up—and was doing what seemed eccentric to Leaphorn.
'Watering your rosebush?' he asked. 'Looks like you're trying to knock the leaves off.'
'No,' said Perez, 'I'm trying to get rid of the damned aphids.'
'They don't like water?'
Perez laughed. 'You try to knock them off the stems,' Perez said. 'It's better than using poison. That kills the ladybugs, and the birds, and all your other helpers. If you can knock the aphids off with the water, they can't climb back up again.' He turned off the hose. 'But it's a lost cause anyway, trying to grow roses in Gallup. Wrong climate.'
'I need a favor, if you have time.'
'When you catch me out squirting water on aphids, you know I'm not terrible busy.'
'I'm still on that wailing woman business out at the fort,' Leaphorn said. 'I wanted to see if you could give me a clearer picture of just where those kids were when they heard it, and from which direction they said the sounds were coming.'
'You mean go on out there and sort of try to re-create it for you?'
'That's what I had in mind. And maybe see if we could get Gracella Garcia to come along.'
'I guess we could handle that. When you want to do it?'
'How about right now?'
'I can't do it today,' Perez said. 'You in a hurry?'
'Sort of,' said Leaphorn. 'But I guess it could wait.'
'I could pretty well tell you just where it was, if you're in a rush,' said Perez as he walked over to his fence. 'You know they have those bunkers blocked off? Well, they were—'
'Well, no, I don't. I never had very much business out there, and when I did I wasn't paying that sort of attention.'
'You know the military, though,' Perez said. 'The army divided all those bunkers off into ten blocks, and lettered the blocks from A to J, and then numbered the bunkers. Like, for example, B1028.'
'Divided them off by what they had in them?' Leaphorn asked.
'God knows.' Perez said. 'I think they did it during the Vietnam War when they added some new ones. They were running virtually all the munitions and explosive stuff through Wingate then. Busy, busy. Artillery shells, rockets, mines, everything. Big boom for Gallup. New rail lines had to be built, everything.' Perez laughed. 'They even built concrete shelters every so often so people working could run in them for shelter in case lightning might strike something and blow things up.'
Leaphorn had stopped paying close attention to the rest of this report after Perez cited the bunker-labeling system.
'Each bunker had its own number?'
'Letter and number.'
'How many bunkers in each block?'
'I don't know. They used ten letters, A through J, and there's about eight hundred bunkers, so I'd guess a hundred to a block, but maybe they lettered 'em by what's stored inside. Like 'A' for artillery, and 'B' for bombs, and—' Perez paused, unable to think of anything that exploded that started with a 'C.'
'These days, 'E' for empty would be the letter they'd need for most of the blocks. Anyway, the army rule was no bunker could be closer than two hundred yards to another one, and they used about twenty-four-thousand acres scattering them out. Had to build a hell of a lot of railroad track.'
'How about the numbers?' Leaphorn asked. 'I noticed some of them had four numbers after the letter.'
Perez frowned. 'I think maybe all of them did,' he said. 'No idea why, except they seemed to be in order. Like B1222 would come after B1221.'
'What block were the kids in?'
'I think it was 'D,'' Perez said. 'Or maybe 'C.''
'I'm going on out there and look around,' Leaphorn said. 'If I learn anything, I'll call you.'
But now Leaphorn found he couldn't remember the number on the card with Doherty's stuff. He was sure it began with a D, but his usually fine memory had jumbled together Peshlakai's cellphone number, Denton's unlisted number, his advertisement number, and Doherty's four digits. But he did remember telling the number to Chee, and Chee jotting it into his notebook.
Chee was probably still in Gallup. Leaphorn called the fbi office there. Chee wasn't there, but Bernie was. She said Chee would be in any minute for a meeting with Osborne. Did he want to leave a message?
'I wanted to ask him if he had that number found on the back of that business card in Doherty's stuff. I remember he wrote it down.'
'It was a 'D' followed by 2187,' she said. 'Have you found out what it's about?'
'It's probably the number of a bunker out at Fort Wingate,' Leaphorn said, thinking how great it had been when he, too, had had such a young and vigorous memory. He explained as much as he knew of the army's blocking system.
