done some talking on his cell phone during the trip. Probably telling any illegals who might be where they were headed that a cop was coming.
Three men were standing by the trucks as O’day drove up, apparently waiting. Fat chance of her seeing anything they didn’t want her to see. But then if they were smuggling illegals, where could they have hidden them?
O’day opened her truck door, inviting her out.
“Here we are,” he said. “And here is your smuggler. Colonel Abraham Gonzales of Seamless Welds Incorporated. And Mr. Gonzales, this young lady is Officer Manuelito of the U.S. Border Patrol.”
Gonzales bowed, tipped his cap, said:
Gonzales gestured toward the open side of his trailer. “No place in here to haul illegals,” he said. “But you’re welcome to take a look.”
“OK,” Bernie said. “But actually I misread your license plate. I thought it was a Canadian truck and maybe you were smuggling in maple syrup, or something like that.”
Gonzales considered that a moment and laughed. So did O’day, but his seemed genuine.
“I doubt if Mr. Gonzales has anything illegal in that trailer,” he said. “But maybe you ought to look. And I’ve got to get this crew back to work.”
“Doing what?” Bernie asked, walking to the trailer. “What are you building? Or digging?”
“We’re going to set up that windmill,” O’day said, pointing to a pile of framework beside the shack. “Going to have a little oasis here. Water tanks for the livestock and a place for Mr. Tuttle’s pets to get a drink.”
“Oryxs. Right? I’d like to see one of those.”
“Just take a look,” he said. “That’s a couple of them over yonder.” He pointed east toward the hills. “They’re waiting for us to go away so they can come in and see if there’s anything in the tank for them to drink. Trouble is, it’s about dry. We’re going to try to fix that.”
“Where are they?” Bernie said. “Oh, I see them now. Wow. Bigger than I expected. Aren’t they a kind of antelope?”
“African antelope,” O’day said. “One of Tuttle’s hunting buddies shot one out here last spring. Weighed over four hundred pounds.”
Bernie finished a cursory check of the tools on the trailer’s racks, the welding masks, propane tanks, compressor engine, and a lot of large machinery far beyond her comprehension. She nodded to Gonzales. “Thank you. I don’t often get a chance to meet colonels.”
Gonzales looked slightly abashed. “Retired,” he said. “And from one of the Mexican army’s less noted reserve regiments.”
O’day was grinning at her. “That about do it?”
“I think so,” she said. “What’s the best way from here to get to ...” Bernie paused, visualizing her map, looking for a place that should be fairly nearby and also on a regular marked road that actually went somewhere. “To get to Hatchita.”
“First I got to let you back through the gate. From there you—hell, I’ll show you when we get there.”
“First I want to get a picture of those oryx,” Bernie said. She reached into her truck and extracted the camera. “No harm shooting them with a camera is there?”
O’day stared out at the animals, still waiting on the hillside. “Kinda far away,” he said. “They’ll just be specks.”
“I’ve got a telescopic lens,” she said, tapping it, and got into her truck. “But I’ll drive a little ways up the hill there to get a better shot.”
“Well, now,” he said, looking doubtful.
“Just a few hundred yards,” Bernie said, starting the engine. “I want to get where I won’t have all this clutter in the picture. Make it look like I shot it in the wilds of Africa.”
That seemed to satisfy O’day, but when she stopped a quarter mile up the hill he was still watching her. She focused on the largest oryx, which also seemed to be staring at her. Then she got another shot of Gonzales, also staring, and of his van, the shack, and the equipment around it. Why waste those last exposures on a thirty-six- frame roll?
O’day pointed her way through what he called “Hatchet Gap,” which led her to a road that actually had been graded and graveled, and on to County Road 9, and thence to Hatchita and the turn south toward Interstate Highway 10 and Eleanda’s little house in Rodeo. Straight road now, no traffic. She extracted Jim Chee’s letter from her jacket pocket. She spread it on the steering wheel and zipped through the introductory paragraphs to the terminal portion.
Bernie made a face, refolded the letter back into her pocket.
“And sincerely to you, too, Sergeant Chee,” she said to the windshield, feeling sour, dusty, and exhausted. But by the time she saw the little cluster of buildings that formed Rodeo, she was thinking about the Mexican welding/metal construction connection. She’d want to talk about this with Mr. Henry. Make sure she knew what sort of checking she should do to find out if that famous North American Free Trade Agreement made all such traffic free and easy. And she’d want to talk with Jim Chee about the welding/metal construction company renting the car for his homicide victim.
7
Former Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, now retired, had his day pretty well planned. Professor Louisa Bourbonette was up on the Ute Reservation collecting her oral histories from the tribe’s elderly. She had left even earlier than usual, the sky visible through his east-facing window barely showing predawn pink when her bumping around in her bedroom awakened him.
He listened to the sound of her car fading, felt a twinge of loneliness, and considered for a moment bringing up the topic of marriage again, and then dismissed the idea. She’d tell him, as she always did, that she had tried that once and didn’t care for it. That would be followed by a few days of uneasiness between them and of his feeling a vague sort of guilt for even thinking of trying to replace Emma. The infection had killed her physically, but Emma lived on in his mind. Emma would always be his lover. But Louisa had become a confidante and a friend. He was smart enough to see she cared for him, and the sentiment was mutual.
Hearing Louisa drive away left a sort of silence that made him remember too much. He had planned to use the quiet time to exercise his mind—gone rusty with retirement idleness. He’d accumulated a list of nine really tough Free Cell games he’d had to abandon unsolved on his computer. He consumed his breakfast coffee and toast,
