proper friend, and collected the information he needed about who managed which pipelines and the ebb and flow, sales and resales, of oil and gas in and out of the San Juan Basin fields. He left the building with his pocket recorder full of notes about the San Juan Basin fields— about nineteen hundred oil, gas, and methane wells actively producing in just the New Mexico section of that field, and drilling rigs adding new ones every year, with geologists estimating that more than a hundred trillion cubic feet of gas is under the rocks there, and about twenty different oil, gas, and pipeline companies fighting for a share of the treasure. Making the job look even more impossible, his notes confirmed what he’d guessed would be true. The records kept by the Department of the Interior were in shambles, and had been a total mess dating back as far as his sources had looked—which was into the 1940s. It was hopeless, he thought, but for fifty thousand dollars whether he learned anything or not, it would be an interesting project.
And now it was two Mondays later. He was about fifteen hundred miles west of the chic Bistro Bis of the Hotel George and Washington’s E Street. He was sitting in a Jeep Cherokee beside a dirt road at the fringe of the Bisti Oil-Gas field, close to where the Jicarilla Apache reservation meets the Navajo Nation in the very heart of America’s version of the Persian Gulf—the San Juan Basin.
More important, Carl Mankin had just realized he was being followed—and that this had been going on since the evening after he’d left the Seamless Weld office in El Paso in the rental Jeep. It was a bad feeling for Carl Mankin. He’d learned how to spot a tail more than thirty years ago in Lebanon, taught by an old CIA hand in the Beirut embassy. He’d practiced the skill of being invisible in Iraq when Saddam and his Republican Guards were fighting the Iranians as our Cold War ally. He’d used it again when Saddam was becoming our Desert Storm enemy, and refined it to perfection in Yemen, where the Al Qaeda was plotting its terrorism. He had become very good at knowing who was walking behind him.
But two lazy years in Washington must have made him careless. Across the street from the Seamless Weld office he’d seen the man now tailing him, noticing him because he wore a forked beard and not because Mankin suspected anything. He saw him again when he came out of the FBI office in Gallup—in a car in the parking lot. He’d seen that forked beard a third time a few minutes ago, the face of a man sitting on the passenger side of a Dodge pickup reflected in the rearview mirror of the Jeep Cherokee Mankin was driving.
Three sightings at three very different locations were too many for coincidence. Of course, the man had to be a rank amateur. No professional would wear such a memorable beard. Probably no danger involved here. Why would there be danger? It would just be someone wanting to know why a stranger was looking into a very lucrative and competitive business. But those old instincts of caution Mankin developed working in enemy territory had abruptly revived. The man had gotten on his trail at Seamless Weld in El Paso. How? Or why?
One isn’t followed for love and kindness. Perhaps the senator, or whomever the senator was working for, connected him to Seamless because they suspected that company was involved in the corruption. Thus that would be the place to start him looking for connections.
He watched the pickup roll past on the road just below him, Forked Beard out of his line of vision. Its driver, a younger man wearing a blue baseball cap, glanced at the Cherokee and quickly looked away. Just the sort of thing professionals were taught never to do.
Carl Mankin waited, listening to the pickup moving slowly down the dirt road, hearing the crows quarreling in the pines and the sounds of the breeze in the trees. Relaxing. Feeling the old familiar tension slip away. He stepped out of the Jeep, listening. The crows left. The breeze faded. Mankin held his breath. Silence. How could the truck have gotten out of hearing range so quickly? Perhaps in a thicker patch of forest. Perhaps down a slope.
Some of the tension had returned now, but Mankin had driven two hours to reach this place. The metal structure across the road from him, so he’d been told by the driver of a Haliburton repair truck, was a pipeline junction switching point. “A lot of work going on out there,” the man had said. “Installing some new measurement stuff and a bigger compressor. Why the hell would they be doing that? I couldn’t guess.”
Mankin couldn’t guess either. But the “new measurement stuff” suggested a possibility that maybe the old measurements had been less than accurate, and maybe that had been intentional, to cover up some cheating on the records, and maybe that was the sort of thing he was looking for. Probably not. But he’d come this far. He would walk over and see what he could see.
He stopped that short walk twice to listen. He heard the sound the breeze made in the pines and crows arguing a long way down the road. Otherwise nothing. The building was locked, as he’d guessed it would be, since no vehicles were parked there. He peered through the dusty window and saw what he’d expected to see. A compressor, tanks, gauges, a worktable, pipes of various dimensions, valves, etcetera. Just what he had seen in such places in oil-patch country from the Middle East to Alaska to Indonesia to Wyoming. But he saw no sign of any work currently going on.
He was recrossing the road, almost back to the Jeep, when he saw Forked Beard for the fourth time. The man was standing under the trees beyond the Jeep, the younger man in the blue baseball cap stood beside him. Both men were looking at him. Blue Cap held a rifle and the rifle was swinging toward him.
Carl Mankin spun into a running crouch. Old as he was, he was quick. He made at least a dozen long running steps before the bullet hit him, midback, between the shoulder blades, and knocked him facedown into the dirt.
2
“Well, look at this,” said Cowboy Dashee, grinning up at Sergeant Jim Chee. “I’ll bet that any minute now you’re going to be asking me to go ahead and handle this guy. Doing me a favor. Giving me a chance to keep my hand in on such things as murder.”
Dashee was standing beside the body of a medium-sized male, gray-blond hair cut into a burr, sprawled facedown in a brushy growth of mountain mahogany, partly covered with dead leaves and debris, maybe by the wind or maybe for concealment.
“Feel free,” said Chee. “You probably could use a refresher on your crime scene technique now that you’re sort of a bureaucrat.”
Dashee was a Hopi, and thus untroubled by Chee’s traditional Navajo aversion to handling corpses, and Dashee might have been wearing the uniform of his Federal Bureau of Land Management law-enforcement unit. Today he was off duty and in his more casual attire—jeans and well-worn T-shirt. He’d been drinking coffee in Chee’s Navajo Tribal Police Shiprock office when Chee’s telephone buzzed. An El Paso Natural Gas employee had noticed a dead man in a ditch out northeast of Degladito Mesa where Navajo country bumps into the Jicarilla Apache Reservation.
“Notice how careful I am with your crime scene,” Dashee said. “I avoid stepping where whoever hauled our victim in here stepped. Or where the victim himself might have stepped when he walked in here to kill himself.”
“OK,” Chee said. “Get on with it.”
“I’m not always so careful,” Dashee said, “but this is probably a felony murder on the Navajo Reservation, which means the FBI is going to take over soon as somebody tells them about it, and if it turns out to be a tough case, then the Bureau will need someone to blame when they screw it up. I don’t want it to be Officer Cowboy Dashee. Been there and done that back when I was a deputy sheriff.”
“So far you’ve been flawless,” Chee said, watching Dashee checking the body.
“Hole in the back of jacket,” Dashee said. “Probably the entry place. But no blood that I can see and no powder marks. I’ll get some close-up photos before I move the body.”
“I’ll go call it in,” Chee said.
“I’m avoiding my usual sloppiness because I’m remembering all the trouble your girlfriend got into. Officer Bernie thinking the guy in the truck was just another dead drunk, instead of a shot-dead drunk.” Dashee paused to chuckle at his pun. “And the shot wasn’t from a whiskey glass.”
“I guess you’re talking about Officer Manuelito,” Chee said, no longer looking amused. “She’s not my girlfriend.”
“I heard she’d left you. I meant girlfriend then. Meant ‘used-to-be’ girlfriend.”
“Not then, either,” Chee said. “She worked for me. You don’t make moves on women who work for you.”
“You don’t?” said Dashee, making it sound surprised. But Chee was already walking back to his car radio.
