'Former undersheriff. Knows people at the fort. Hand me the cellphone out of the glovebox.'
Denton got out the cellphone, inspected it, said: 'What's the number for Perez?'
Leaphorn told him.
'You know how it sounds when you cock a pistol?'
'Sure.'
'Then listen to this.' The click of a pistol being cocked followed. 'The pistol is a forty-five caliber. You know what that does to somebody. If you say anything to Perez that sounds suspicious to me, then I shoot you, turn off the ignition, grab the wheel, pull your truck off the road, wipe everything down for my fingerprints, leave the gun on the floor. No prints on it and none on the rounds in the magazine. There'll be not a drop of blood on me. I just open the door and step out and walk away.'
'You won't have to bother with a self-defense plea this time, then,' Leaphorn said.
'Right,' said Denton. He pushed the speaker volume to the top, dialed the number, listened for a second to the voice that answered, then handed it to Leaphorn.
'Lorenzo, this is Joe Leaphorn. Can I get you to call security out at Fort Wingate and ask them to let me in? Just tell 'em I'm working on something with you.'
'Sure,' Lorenzo said. 'I already did. What is—'
'Thanks,' Leaphorn said, and disconnected.
'Already did?' Denton said. 'What's that mean?'
'I told him I was going out there today to see what I could find.'
Denton didn't comment on that. And when Leaphorn asked him what else McKay had said about Linda and his back-up plan, Denton said, 'I don't want to talk about it.' The rest of the trip was made in tense and gloomy silence. Leaphorn broke it once, just before they made the turn into the fort's entrance, to comment on a massive cumulus-nebulous cloud building up over the Zuni Mountains. He pointed toward it. 'Maybe we'll finally get some rain,' he said. 'That looks promising.'
Denton said, 'Just drive,' and he didn't speak again until Leaphorn slowed at the security gate of the bunker area.
'Remember this,' he said, and showed Leaphorn the pistol, one of those 1902 model .45 automatics the U.S. Army had been using through every war up to Desert Storm. 'If the security man at the gate wants to talk, don't.'
The security man offered no opportunity for conversation. He simply grinned and waved them through.
Leaphorn had long since abandoned the notion that Wiley Denton wouldn't actually shoot him and had been concentrating on coming up with some sort of action to abort that. He'd read too much and had seen too many movies about the training of the Green Berets in efficient killing to have much hope of overpowering Denton. He might be rusty, being half a lifetime away from ambushing Vietcong on the Cambodian side of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but he was incurably bigger, burlier, and, alas, younger than Leaphorn. He'd finally settled on getting Denton to bunker D2187 so filled with dread (or hope) concerning what they might find there that he would be—despite his training—incautious for a required moment or two. During which Leaphorn would do something suitable, which he hoped he could think of.
Now, however, the problem was finding bunker D2187 in the vast maze of weed-grown railroad tracks, crumbling asphalt access roads, and rows and rows of great grassy humps. While these were neatly spaced two hundred yards apart as the army had required, the rolling terrain of the Zuni Mountains foothills defeated the West Pointian obsession with straight and unbroken lines. After two wrong turns, one of which led them into an old but still unbroken security fence, Denton began to lose patience.
'I'm beginning to get skeptical about this,' he said. 'Where do you think you're going?'
'We're going to a block of bunkers labeled 'D,'' Leaphorn said.
'These have a 'G' over the doors,' Denton said. 'Are you lost, or are you just bulling me?'
Leaphorn backed around, made the first possible right turn onto a street where the asphalt paving was so worn it was mostly reduced to gravel. The first bunker he passed bore the label D2163 (faded by years of weather) over its massive door. After a slow quarter mile of counting off numbers, Leaphorn pulled his pickup off the gravel and parked in front of bunker D2187. Finally! It actually existed. He took a deep breath and blew it out.
'This is it?' Denton asked.
Leaphorn took his flashlight from the glovebox, opened his door, got out, and studied the bunker door—a great, heavy slab of steel covered with peeled and rusty-looking army paint. Fastened to the bunker's bare cement front to the right of the entry were two steel boxes, mounted side by side, labeled respectively '1' and '2.' A metal tube ran up the concrete face of the bunker into box 2, and another such tube linked box 2 to box 1, from which five similar tubes emerged. One ran up the face of the bunker and disappeared over the roof. The four others ran downward, three of them disappearing through the front of the bunker at floor level and the other running along the ground and up the wall and linking to a device on one of the bottom hinges.
Denton now had joined him in this inspection.
'The one going over the roof probably served the ventilating pump they have on top of these bunkers,' Denton said. 'The others probably involve some sort of an alarm system, humidity or temperature sensors, or maybe an alarm to signal if the door opened without the proper code.' He produced a contemptuous snort. 'And you haven't got the code.'
'Nobody has the code,' Leaphorn said. 'It's been decommissioned for years. The army base up in Utah that is supposed to keep an eye on things uses it now and then to shoot off target rockets down to White Sands for that Star Wars foolishness. No need for security anymore.'
As he was explaining that, he was thinking the door seemed altogether too secure. Another steel box, slightly rusted, was welded to its center. Near the bottom was a bolt locking device. The bolt seemed to be missing. The only thing Leaphorn was sure he understood was the steel locking bar that swung across the door and, when clamped down, prevented it from being opened.
