“I’ve heard about that crash, I think,” Sherman said. “Long, long time ago, wasn’t it? And we’re trying to find the bones of that guy carrying the diamonds.” He shook his head, laughed. “You serious?”
“Well, actually it’s not that simple. Here we have one side of a two-sided game. People on the other side are trying to find those bones and use them to capture the Clarke fortune,” Chandler said. “Our job is to make sure that poor fellow’s bones stay lost and never get dragged into a courtroom.”
Sherman considered that, face solemn. Then he smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “That sounds like a worthy cause with righteous purposes. And I can see how that would be a lot easier.”
Chandler nodded.
“Finding old bones down in that canyon is worse than hunting the needle in the haystack. It’s like hunting the needle in a whole farm full of haystacks. And not even knowing which farm it’s on. So maybe we could just be happy with keeping anyone else from finding them.”
“Yes,” Chandler said. “Easier to find the hunter than the needle.”
“You sound like maybe you have a plan,” Sherman said. “I’d like to hear it. You know, it helps me if I understand what you’re trying to do.”
“You’re getting the idea now,” Chandler said. “First, we understand our goal. Our goal is not—underline that,
“Sure,” Sherman said, looking slightly resentful. “I already said I understood it.”
“That’s the first thing to understand. Now, the second thing is this. We know that case full of diamonds was handcuffed to the owner’s arm. To the bones in question. We have to presume that the Tuve diamond, and that trading post burglary diamond, came from that package. Thus they are the only clues to where those bones might be. The other side, the bad guys, know as much about that as we do. Maybe more. So our goal is to get there first. Got it?”
“Of course,” he said, and then thought about it awhile. “Then do what? My impression is that your paycheck depends on the other side never getting hold of those bones. At least not long enough to get them into court. Right? So what do we do if the other side gets there first?”
“I guess that would depend on how much you wanted to earn that big bonus,” Chandler said. “I guess you’d do whatever the situation demanded. You know. To get those bones away from the bad guys.”
Sherman spent another moment thinking.
“Arizona is a death penalty state,” he said. “For murder done in commission of a felony, anyway. But I’ll bet you already knew that.”
“I did,” Chandler agreed. “I also know the bottom of that canyon is loaded with dangerous places. Falling rocks. Folks swept away in the river rapids. Drowning. People slipping and tumbling down the cliffs.”
Sherman nodded. Grinned at Chandler. “Wouldn’t you hate to be the district attorney trying to prove somebody was pushed instead of just slipped? I mean, when nobody saw what happened?”
“Sounds like a case of reasonable doubt to me,” Chandler said. “Okay, then. Here’s what I want you to do. And the very first thing, right now, today, is locate Billy Tuve.”
“Any idea where?”
“He lives on Second Mesa. You heard his uncle saying he’d come to take him home. He lives with his mama in a little village. Kykotsmovi, however you pronounce it. Shouldn’t be hard to find it.”
“Find him and what?”
“Find him and bring him to me.”
“Then what?”
“Then we take him down to the bottom of the canyon, to the area where he got the diamond. Then he shows us how to find where the man he got it from came from. When we find that man, then we find the left arm bones of this Clarke guy and what’s left of the diamonds he was carrying.”
“And split them?”
“Well, I presume the man who’s hiring us would want them himself. But I don’t think he has them counted.”
Sherman laughed. “He wouldn’t miss a few of ’em.”
11
The plan, carefully drawn up by Sergeant Jim Chee, involved having Bernie spend the evening with him at his Shiprock trailer, during which they would enjoy themselves and pack up the assorted stuff they needed for the junket into the depth of the Grand Canyon. Then they would head westward to Tuba City. Meanwhile, Cowboy Dashee would have gone to Kykotsmovi on the Hopi Second Mesa and picked up Billy Tuve at his family home there. That done, Dashee would bring Tuve to the grocery store/service station at Tuba, where they’d meet Chee and Bernie. From there, Cowboy would lead the way on a back-road shortcut to Moenkopi, thence westward via an unimproved and unnamed dirt road to a place on the East Rim just north of the Little Colorado Canyon gorge. They would park there. Dashee and Tuve, both members of the prestigious Hopi Bear Clan and thus both Salt Trail initiates, would lead them down, down, down into the depths. Once at the bottom, Tuve would show them exactly where he had traded his folding shovel for the diamond, and the direction he’d seen the owner of gem take to retrieve it.
As such careful and detailed plans tend to do, this one began falling apart in phase one.
