The Dark Wind jlajc-5

by Tony Hillerman

  Chee couldn't think of anything to say. Disbelief mixed with anger. This was incredible. He reached for his shirt, put it on, stood up in his shorts.

  "Get the hell out of here," he said to Johnson.

  "Not yet," Johnson said. "We're here on business."

  "We'll do any business we have over at the office," Chee said. "Get out."

  Collins was behind him now and it happened too quickly for Chee to ever know exactly how he did it. He found himself face down on the bunk, with his wrists twisted high behind his shoulders. He felt Johnson's hand pinning him while Collins snapped handcuffs on his wrists. It must have been something the two of them practiced, Chee thought.

  They released him. Chee sat up on the bunk. His hands were cuffed behind him.

  "We need to get something straight," Johnson said. "I'm the cop and you're the suspect. That Indian badge don't mean a damn thing to me."

  Chee said nothing.

  "Keep on looking," Johnson said to Collins. "It's got to be bulky and there can't be many places it could hide in here. Make sure you don't miss any of them."

  "I haven't." Collins said. But he moved into the kitchen area and began opening drawers.

  "You had a little meeting yesterday with Gaines," Johnson said. "I want to know all about that."

  "Go screw yourself," Chee said.

  "You and Gaines arranged a little deal, I guess. He told you what they'd be willing to pay to buy their coke back. And he told you what would happen to you if you didn't cough it up. That about right?"

  Chee said nothing. Collins was looking in the oven, checking under the sink. He poured a little detergent into his palm, examined it, and rinsed it off under the tap. "I already looked everyplace once," Collins said.

  "Maybe we're not going to find that coke stashed here," Johnson said. "Maybe we're not going to find the money here either. It don't look like you were that stupid. But by God you're going to tell me where to find it."

  Johnson struck Chee across the face, a stinging, back-handed blow.

  "The best way to do it would be unofficial," Johnson said. "You just tell me right now, and I forget where I heard it, and you can just go on being a Navajo cop. No going to jail. No nothing. We do a lot of unofficial business." He grinned at Chee, a wolfish show of big, even white teeth in a sunburned red face. "Get more work done that way."

  Chee's nose hurt. He felt a trickle of blood start from it, moving down his lip. His face stung and his eyes were watering. But the real effect of the blow was psychological. His mind seemed detached from all this, working at several levels. At one, it was trying to remember the last time anyone had struck him. He had been a boy when that happened, fighting with a cousin. At another level his intelligence considered what he should do, what he should say, why this was happening.

  And at still another, he felt simple animal rage—an instinct to kill.

  He and Johnson stared at each other, neither blinking. Collins finished in the kitchen and disappeared in the tiny bath. There was the noise of him taking something apart.

  "Where is it?" Johnson asked. "The plane had the stuff on it, and the people who came to get it haven't got it. We know that. We know who took it, and we know he had to have some help, and we know you were it. Where'd you take it?"

  Chee tested the handcuffs behind him, hurting his wrists. The muscles in his left shoulder were cramping where Collins had strained it. "You son of a bitch," Chee said. "You're crazy."

  Johnson slapped him again. Same backhand. Same place.

  "You were out there," Johnson said. "We don't know how you got onto the deal, but that doesn't matter. We just want the stuff."

  Chee said nothing at all.

  Johnson removed his pistol from its shoulder holster. It was a revolver with a short barrel. He jammed the barrel against Chee's forehead.

  "You're going to tell me," Johnson said. He cocked the pistol. "Now."

  The metal of the gun barrel pressed into the skin, hard against the bone. "If I knew where that stuff was, I'd tell you," Chee said. He was ashamed of it, but it was the truth. Johnson seemed to read it in his face. He grunted, removed the pistol, lowered the hammer, and stuck the gun back in the holster.

  "You know something," Johnson said, as if to himself. He looked around at Collins, who had stopped his hunt to watch, and then stared at Chee again, thinking. "When you know a little more, there's a smart way for you to handle it. Just see to it that I get the word. An anonymous note would do it. Or call me. That way, if you don't trust the dea not to hammer you, you'd know we couldn't prove you tried to steal the stuff. And I couldn't turn you in for killing Jerry Jansen."

  Chee had his mind working again. He remembered Jansen was the body left at the plane. But how much would Johnson tell him?

  "Who's Jansen?" he asked.

  Johnson laughed. "Little late to ask," he said. "He's the brother of the big man himself, the one who put this all together. And the one killed on the airplane, he was big medicine, too. Relative of the people buying the shipment."

  "Pauling?"

  "Pauling was nothing," Johnson said. "The taxi driver. You worry about the other one."

  There was the sound of breaking glass in the shower. Collins had dropped something.

  "So you see, I haven't got much time to work with you," Johnson said. He was smiling. "You've got two sets of hard people stirred up. They're going to make the connection right away and they're going to be coming after you. They're going to twist that dope out of you and if you can't deliver it, they'll just keep twisting."

  Chee could think of nothing helpful to say to that.

  "The only way to go is the easy way," Johnson said. "You tell me where you and Palanzer put it. I find it. Nobody is any wiser. Any other way we handle it, you're dead. Or if you're lucky you get ten to twenty in the federal pen. And with those two people killed, you wouldn't last long in federal pen."

  "I don't know where it is," Chee said. "I'm not even sure what it is."

  Johnson looked at him, mildly and without comment. A smell of cologne seeped into Chee's nostrils. Collins had broken his aftershave lotion. "What did Gaines want?" Johnson said. He pulled Gaines's card out of his shirt pocket and looked at it. It had been in Chee's billfold.

  "He wanted to know what happened to the car. The one I heard driving off."

  "How'd he know about that?"

  "He read my report. At the station. He told 'em he was the pilot's lawyer."

  "Why'd he give you the card?"

  "He wanted me to find the car for him. I said I'd let him know."

  "Can you find it?"

  "I don't see how," Chee said. "Hell, it's probably in Chicago by now, or Denver, or God knows where. Why would it stay around? From what I hear, you're circulating the picture of the guy that's supposed to be driving it. This Palanzer. Why would he stick around?"

  "I'll ask the questions," Johnson said.

  "But don't you think Palanzer got off with the stuff? Why else are you looking for him?"

  "Maybe Palanzer got it and maybe he didn't, and maybe he had a lot of help if he did. Like a Navajo tribal cop who knows this country and knows a hole they can hide it in until things cool off some."

  "But—"

  "Shut up," Johnson said. "This is wasting time. I'll tell you what we're going to do. We're going to wait just a little while. Give you some time to think it over. I figure you've got a day or two before the people who own that dope decide to come after you. You give some thought to what they'll do to you and then you get in touch with me and we'll deal."

  "One thing," Collins said from just behind Chee. "It damn sure ain't hid in here."

  "But don't wait too long," Johnson said. "You haven't got much time."

  Chapter Twelve

  When captain largo worried, his round, bland face resolved itself into a pattern of little wrinkles—something like a brown honeydew melon too long off the vine. Largo was worried now. He sat ramrod straight behind his desk, an unusual position f
or the captain's plump body, and listened intently to what Jim Chee was saying. What Chee was saying was angry and directly to the point, and when he finished saying it, Largo got up from his chair and walked over to the window and looked out at the sunny morning.

  "They pull a gun on you?" he asked.

  "Right."

  "Hit you? That right?"

  "Right," Chee said.

  "When they took off the cuffs, they told you that if you filed a complaint, their story would be you invited them in, invited them to search, they didn't lay a hand on you. That right?"

  "That's it," Chee said.

  Largo looked out the window some more. Chee waited. From where he stood he could see through the glass past the captain's broad back. He could see the expanse of bunch grass, bare earth, rocks, scattered cactus, which separated the police building from the straggling row of old buildings called Tuba City. The sky had the dusty look of a droughty summer. Far across the field a cloud of blue smoke emerged from the sheet-metal garage of the Navajo Road Department—a diesel engine being test run. Largo seemed to be watching the smoke.

  "Two days, they said, before the people who owned the dope figured you had it. Right?"

  "That's what Johnson said," Chee agreed.

  "He sound like he was guessing, or like he knew?" Largo was still looking out the window, his face away from Chee.

  "Of course he was guessing," Chee said. "How would he know?"

  Largo came back and sat at the desk again. He fiddled with whatever odds and ends he kept in the top drawer.

  "Here's what I want you to do," he said. "Write all this down and sign it, and date it, and give it to me. Then you take some time off. You got two days coming. Take a whole week. Get the hell away from here for a while."

  "Write it down? What good will that do?"

  "Good to have it," Largo said. "Just in case."

  "Shit," Chee said.

  "These white men got you screwed," Largo said. "Face it. You file a complaint. What happens? Two belacani cops. One Navajo. The judge is belacani, too. And the Navajo cop is already under suspicion of getting off with the dope. What good does it do you? Go back in the Chuskas. Visit your folks. Get away from here."

  "Yeah," Chee said. He was remembering Johnson's hand stinging across his face. He would take time off, but he wouldn't go to the Chuskas. Not yet.

  "These drug police, they're hard people," Largo said. "Don't work by the rules. Do what they want to do. I don't know what they're going to do next. Neither do you. Take your time off. This isn't our business. Get out of the way. Don't tell anybody where you're going. Good idea not to."

  "Okay," Chee said. "I won't." He walked to the door. "One other thing, Captain. Joseph Musket didn't show up for work at Burnt Water the day John Doe was killed and dumped up on the mesa. Not that day or the day before. I want to go to Santa Fe—to the state pen—and see what I can find out about Musket. Will you set it up?"

  "I read your report this morning," Largo said. "You didn't mention that."

  "I called Jake West later. After it was written."

  "You think Musket is a witch?"

  Largo might have smiled very faintly when he asked it. Chee wasn't sure.

  "I just don't understand Musket," Chee said. He shrugged.

  "I'll get a letter off today," Largo said. "Meanwhile you're on vacation. Get away from here. And remember this drug case is none of our business. It's a federal felony. Where it happened, it's Hopi reservation now, not joint jurisdiction. It doesn't concern Navajo Tribal Police. It doesn't concern Jim Chee." Largo paused and looked directly at Chee. "You hear me?"

  "I hear you," Chee said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It seemed to chee, under the circumstances, that the wise and courteous thing to do was to make the telephone call from somewhere where there was no risk of Captain Largo's learning of it. He stopped at the Chevron station on the corner where the Tuba City road intersects with Arizona 160. He called the Hopi Cultural Center on Second Mesa.

  Yes, Ben Gaines was registered at the motel. Chee let the telephone ring eight or nine times. Then placed the call again. Did they have a woman named Pauling registered? They did. She answered on the second ring.

  "This is Officer Chee," Chee said. "You remember. The Navajo Tribal…"

  "I remember you," Miss Pauling said.

  "I'm trying to get hold of Ben Gaines," Chee said.

  "I don't think he's in his room. The car he rented has been gone all day and I haven't seen him."

  "When I talked to you, he wanted me to find a vehicle for him," Chee said. "Do you know if that's turned up yet?"

  "Not that I've heard about. I don't think so."

  "Would you tell Gaines I'm looking into it?"

  "Okay," the woman said. "Sure."

  Chee hesitated. "Miss Pauling?"

  "Yes."

  "Have you known Gaines a long time?"

  There was a pause. "Three days," Miss Pauling said.

  "Did your brother ever mention him?"

  Another long pause.

  "Look," Miss Pauling said. "I don't know what you're getting at. But no. That wasn't the sort of thing we talked about. I didn't know he had a lawyer."

  "You think you should trust Gaines?"

  In Chee's ear the telephone made a sound which might have passed for laughter. "You really are a policeman, aren't you," Miss Pauling said. "How do they teach you not to trust anybody?"

  "Well," Chee said, "I was…"

  "I know he knew my brother," Miss Pauling said. "And he called me and offered to help with everything. And then he came, and arranged to get the body brought back for the funeral, and told me what to do about getting a grave site in a national cemetery, and everything like that. Why shouldn't I trust him?"

  "Maybe you should," Chee said.

  Chee went home then. He put on his walking boots, got a fresh plastic gallon jug of ice out of the freezer and put it in his old canvas pack with a can of corned beef and a box of crackers. He stowed the bag and his bedroll behind the seat in his pickup and drove back down to the Chevron station. But instead of turning east toward New Mexico, the Chuska Mountains, and his family, he turned west and then southward on Navajo Route 3. Route 3 led past the cluster of Hopi stone huts which are Moenkopi village, into the Hopi Reservation, to Burnt Water Trading Post, and Wepo Wash, and that immensity of empty canyon country where a plane had crashed and a car might, or might not, have been hidden by a thin-faced man named Richard Palanzer.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The first thing chee learned about the missing vehicle was that someone—and Chee guessed it was the Drug Enforcement Agency—had already searched for it. Chee had worked his way methodically down from the crash site, checking every point where a wheeled vehicle could have left the wash bottom. Since the walls of the wash were virtually vertical and rarely rose less than eighteen to twenty feet, these possible exit points were limited to arroyos which fed the wash. Chee had checked each of them carefully for tire tracks. He found none, but at every arroyo there were signs that he wasn't the first to have looked. Two men had done it, two or three days earlier. They had worked together, not separately—a fact taught by noticing that sometimes the man wearing the almost new boots stepped on the other's tracks, and sometimes it worked the other way.

  From the nature of this hunt, Chee surmised that if the truck, or car, or whatever it was, was hidden out here anywhere, it had to be someplace where it couldn't be found from the air. Whoever was looking this hard would certainly have used an airplane. That narrowed things down.

  When it became too dark to work, Chee rolled out his bedroll, dined on canned meat, crackers, and cold water. He got his book of U.S. Geological Survey Quadrangle Maps of Arizona out of his truck and turned to page 34, the Burnt Water Quadrangle. The thirty-two-mile-square section was reduced to a twenty-four-inch square, but provided a map scale at least twenty times larger than a road map, and the federal surveyors had marked in every detail of t
errain, elevation, and drainage.

  Chee sat on the sand with his back against the bumper, using the truck headlights for illumination. He checked each arroyo carefully, coordinating what the map showed him with his memory of the landscape. Behind him, there was a sudden pinging sound—the sound of the pickup engine cooling. From beyond the splash of yellow light formed by the truck lights, an owl screeched out its hunting call, again, and again, and then lapsed into silence. All quiet. And now, faint and far away, somewhere south toward the Hopi Mesas, the purr of an aircraft engine. From Chee's own knowledge, only three of the arroyos that fed Wepo Wash drained areas where a car might easily be hidden. He had already checked the mouth of one and found no tracks. The other two were downstream, both draining into the wash from the northwest, off the slopes of the great eroded hump with the misleading name Big Mountain. Both would lead high enough to get into the big brush and timber country and into the steeper slopes where you could expect to find undercuts and overhangs. In other words, where something as large as a car might be hidden. Tomorrow he would skip down the wash and check them both.

  And, he thought, find absolutely nothing. He would find that whoever the dea was using as a tracker had been there first and had also found nothing. There would be nothing to find. A plane had flown in with a load of dope and a car had come to meet it. The dope had been taken out of the plane and the car had driven away with it. Why keep it out here in the Painted Desert? The only answer Chee could think of to that question led him to Joseph Musket. If Musket was making the decisions, keeping it here would make sense. But Musket was a third-level, minor-league police character involved in a very big piece of business. Richard Palanzer would be the man making the decisions—or at least giving the orders. Why wouldn't Palanzer simply haul the lead away to some familiar urban setting?

  Or was he underestimating Joseph Musket? Was the young man they called Ironfingers more than he seemed to be? Was there a dimension in this which Chee hadn't guessed at? Chee considered the shooting of John Doe. Was this dead Navajo a loose end to something that Musket had taken the day off to tie up with a bullet? And if so, why leave the body out to be found? And why remove the parts a witch would use to make his corpse powder?