a few hours. But I want you to get out that pet rifle of mine, and the gear that goes with it. We’ll take that along when we go out to the pig trap.”
“Pig trap?”
“Pipeliner lingo,” Winsor said. “The pig’s what they call the thing they push down through the pipeline to clean it out, or find leaks, so forth. That gadget you saw on the pipeline at the old smelter, that’s where they put the pig into the pipeline. It’s the pig launcher. When they get the pig where it’s going, they divert it out of the line into a pig trap.”
“Now you’re going to tell me why you’re taking your rifle to the pig trap,” Budge said.
“Going to shoot me a scimitar-horned oryx for my trophy room,” Winsor said. “And maybe I’ll also help you with that job I assigned to you.”
“Killing the cop?” Budge asked. “That woman in the picture? How are we going to find her?”
Winsor laughed. “That’s all arranged,” he said. “Her duty this morning is to drive out to the back gate of the Tuttle Ranch and go take another look at that construction site where she took all those photographs.”
“Oh,” Budge said. He felt sick. Stunned. He’d underestimated Winsor again. He’d thought there was no practical way he’d be expected to find that woman, and he’d dreamed up the scenario he’d been giving to Diego in the hope of forming some sort of alliance if he needed one. He’d thought Winsor was simply exercising his macho bravado. That this problem would go away. But Winsor had found a way to make the nightmare become real.
“When you’re working for me, Budge, you don’t leave things to chance. You arrange things. Like I had them put a big old tarp in the back of the Land Rover. Big enough to keep a trophy-sized oryx head from bleeding all over the upholstery. Plenty big to hold that little cop until we fly her back over the Mexican mountains and drop her off.”
23
Sergeant Jim Chee had no trouble awakening before dawn in the motel at Lordsburg. He had hardly slept. He couldn’t guide his self-conscious into any of those calm, relaxing reveries that bring on sleep. Instead he listened to Cowboy Dashee, comfortable in the adjoining bed, mixing his snoring with an occasional unfinished, undecipherable sleep-talker statement. Some of it was in English, but since he never finished a sentence, or even a phrase, that was as incomprehensible to Chee as when his muttering was in Hopi.
Before five a.m. they were dressed, checked out, and down at a truck stop beside Interstate 10. Cowboy ordered pancakes, sausage, and coffee. So did Chee. But he didn’t feel like eating. Cowboy did, and between bites, studied Chee.
“What’s the trouble?” he asked. “Worried, or is it love sick?”
“Worried,” Chee said. “How am I going to get Bernie to quit this damned Border Patrol job and come on home?”
“That’s easy,” Cowboy said.
“Like hell,” Chee said. “You just don’t understand how stubborn she is.”
“That’s not my problem, ole buddy. What I don’t understand is how you can stay so stupid so long.”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full of pancake,” Chee said.
“If you want her to come home, you just say, ‘Bernie, my sweet, I love you dearly. Come home and marry me and we will live happily ever after.’ ”
“Yeah,” Chee said.
“Maybe you’d also have to tell her you’d get rid of that junky old trailer home of yours down by the river, and live in a regular house. Decent insulation, running water, regular beds instead of bunks, all that.”
“Come on, Cowboy. Be serious. I ask Bernie to marry me. She says, ‘Why would I want to do that?’ Then what do I say?”
“You tell her, ‘Because I love you, and you love me, and when that happens, people get married.’ ”
“Dream on,” Chee said, and followed that with a dismissive snort and a brooding silence. Then: “You think so?”
“What?”
“That she likes me?”
“Damn it, Jim, she loves you.”
“I don’t think so. I wouldn’t bet she even likes me.”
“Find out,” Cowboy said. “Ask her.”
Chee sighed. Shook his head.
“What’s the trouble?”
“Cowardice, I guess,” Chee said.
“Afraid she’ll hurt your feelings?”
“You know my record,” Chee said.
“You mean Janet Pete?” Cowboy said. “The way I read that affair, I figured you dumped her instead of vice versa.”
“It wasn’t that simple,” Chee said. “But start with Mary Landon. Remember her. Beautiful blue-eyed blonde teacher at Crownpoint Middle School, and I wanted to marry her, and she liked the idea but she let me know that what she wanted was somebody to take back to her family’s big dairy farm in Wisconsin, and I’d be the male she rescued from the savages.”
“I didn’t know her,” Cowboy said. “I think that was before I disobeyed my family and friends and started associating with you Navajos.”
“You’d have loved her,” Chee said. “I sure thought I did, and it really hurt when I finally understood the feeling wasn’t mutual.”
“How about Janet? I still see her in federal court now and then when her Washington office sends her out on a case. A real classy lady.”
“Different version of the same story,” Chee said. “I was all set to propose to Janet. In fact, I sort of thought I had. Borrowed a videotape a fellow had made of his daughter’s traditional marriage, all that. But it turned out Janet was the perfect model of what the sociologists call assimilation. Dad a city Navajo. Mother a super-sophisticated, high-society Washingtonian socialite. Janet was all set to take me back as her trophy sheep camp Navajo. She had a socially acceptable job picked out for me. The whole package. She didn’t want Jim Chee. She wanted what she thought she could turn him into.”
Through this discourse, Cowboy was finishing his sausage and looking thoughtful. “Twice burned, you’re thinking. So triple cautious. But the Bernie I know, and the one you tell me about, is a bona fide Navajo. She’s not going to want to drag you off somewhere to try to civilize you.”
“I know,” Chee said. “I’ve just got a feeling that if I make a move on her, she’ll just tell me she’s not interested.”
Cowboy stared at him. Shook his head. “Well, I guess there’s lots of reasons she’d kiss you off. Total lack of romantic instincts, for example. Or maybe she’s spotted an abnormal level of stupidity and decided it’s incurable. I’m beginning to see that problem myself.”
With that Cowboy signaled for the waitress, reminded Chee the expenses on this trip were his responsibility, and handed him the breakfast bill.
“Well, anyway, let’s get on down to the Tuttle Ranch and take a look at that sinister construction project of theirs. Come on, Cowboy,” he said. “Eat. Choke it down, or wash it down with your coffee, or bring it along. Let’s go.”
Dashee grumbled but they went, and thus by the time the sun was rising over the Cedar Mountain range to the east, and turning the flat little cloud cap over Hat Top Mountain a glorious pink, they were exiting County Road 146, slowing a little for the sleeping village of Hachita, and creating clouds of dust along the gravel of County Road 81 down the great emptiness of the Hachita Valley.
“You sure you know where we’re going?” Cowboy asked.
“Yes,” Chee said, and he did. But he wasn’t exactly sure how to get there. And Dashee sensed that.
“That map you have there on your lap. Aren’t those the Big Hatchet Mountains over there to our left?”
“Um, yee-aaow, it looks like they ought to be,” Chee said, very slowly and reluctantly.
“Then from what you told me about where that Tuttle Ranch south gate is located, we seem to have missed
