“Even though they’re mine?” Joanna said.
“Insurance company paid for them,” Chandler said. “Remember that.”
“Paid a hundred thousand dollars.”
“But anyway, legally as of now, they belong to the estate, and the estate belongs to that phony charity Plymale controls.”
Joanna nodded. Massaging her legs, trying to think of a way she could get into her backpack without making him suspicious. How to get out the pistol.
“I need a drink,” she said. If she could reach around, unzip it, and get out her canteen, maybe she could also slip out the gun. Put it in her jacket pocket. She’d feel safer then. She turned, reached for the backpack.
“Here,” Chandler said. “Let me get it for you.”
He pulled it off her shoulders, out of her reach, unzipped it, got out the canteen, handed it to her. Got out her pistol, turned it over in his hand, looked at it, checked the chamber and the magazine. Put the muzzle to his nose and sniffed.
“It’s still fully loaded,” he said. “No burned-powder smell. Is this what you shot Mr. Sherman with?” he asked.
“No,” Joanna said, thinking, How could he possibly know about that?
“Well, you won’t need it now,” he said, and put it in his hip pocket. “And while you’re resting a little while, let’s compare notes on what Tuve told us. And then we’ll go find your bones.”
Chandler was laughing now, looking delighted. “And then we’ll count out our diamonds and divide ’em up.”
21
Bernie Manuelito was still not at the Salt Woman Shrine locale where Sergeant Jim Chee had instructed her to wait. Neither was anyone else. So what was he to do? Chee had not a clue. He had made Cowboy as comfortable as possible for a fellow with a broken and badly swollen leg. He had finally managed to get a call through on his satellite phone to Grand Canyon Park’s rescue service and had been assured that either a copter or some other rescue craft would be on hand “as soon as possible.”
“You’ll just have to wait,” Chee told Dashee. “I think I should be going to see if I can find Bernie.”
“Good riddance,” Dashee said. “It makes me nervous watching you pacing back and forth, biting your fingernails.” He groaned, shifted to a more comfortable position on the sand.
“You sure you didn’t see any trace of her up around where you were? After all, there’s just two ways she could have gone, upriver or downriver, and I didn’t see her upriver.”
“I am sure,” Dashee said. “Absolutely certain. Quit worrying. She’ll be back. But you might start worrying about the weather.”
Dashee pointed downriver at the towering cumulus cloud, its highest level being blown by stratospheric winds into the flat-topped anvil shape. “That’s going to produce what you Navajos call male rains,” he said. “Produce lightning, soil erosion, arroyos, floods, and noise. Us Hopis, we like female rains. They produce corn crops and grass. And down here, by the way, you better not let the runoff from one of those catch you in a narrow little canyon.”
“I’ll worry about the weather, too,” Chee said. “But how about if something happened to her?” He pointed at Dashee’s ankle. “Something like that. She’s smarter than you are, and not so clumsy, but bad things can happen.”
“Or how about something even worse happening to you? Like Bernie seeing some nice-looking, polite young tourist guy with one of those float trips coming down the Colorado. She’d realize she could do a lot better than a homely Navajo Tribal Police sergeant with bad manners.”
“Bad manners? What do you mean?”
“I’m remembering your tone when you ordered her to wait for you. ‘You wait here, Bernie.’” Dashee mimicked Chee’s official tone almost exactly.
“Okay,” Chee said. “You wait here, Mr. Dashee, and don’t hurt yourself again. Have you got enough water?”
“I don’t think we’ll have to worry about going thirsty for long,” Dashee said, and a rumble of thunder punctuated the remark. With that Chee did the only thing he could think of doing: He headed downstream, keeping his eyes and his mind focused on finding the sort of tracks Bernie’s little waffle-soled sneakers might have left.
Chee first found Bernie’s tracks in the damp sand down by the river. When he couldn’t see any more of them there, he headed for any unusual-looking sort of flora along the cliffs and eventually found them again, along with the evidence that Bernie had yielded to her temptation to collect seed pods from whatever plant she considered interesting. His irritation at having to go hunting for her was flooded away by a variety of memories of Bernie—how sweet she looked when deep in thought, when she smiled at him, when she was rapt in admiration of a cloud formation, or a sunset, or the shape of a walnut shell, or the shadows spreading out across the sagebrush slopes when the sun was low. If she was with him now, he thought, she would be admiring the thunderstorm looming above them.
For a while Chee focused on revisiting memories of those times with Bernie, but then the pleasure was interrupted. He began finding other tracks.
Tracks of two people. One wearing hiking boots. Big boots. Size eleven he guessed. The other small, narrow, probably women’s casual sportswear. The man was usually walking in front, the woman sometimes stepping on his tracks. The two usually close together. A couple of tourists, he thought, nothing to concern him. Yet they did seem
