The Dark Wind jlajc-5

by Tony Hillerman

  "It was a little gun, he says. A pistol. In a little while an airplane came over very low to the ground and the man on the ground got up and flashed a flashlight off and on. Little later, the plane came back again. Fellow flashes his light again, and then—just after the airplane crashes—the man with the pistol shoots the man with the flashlight. The airplane hit the rock. The man with the gun takes the flashlight and looks around the airplane some. Then he goes and collects all the lanterns and puts them in the car, except for one. That one he leaves on the rock so he can see something. Then he starts taking things out of the airplane. Then he puts the body of the man he shot up against the rock and gets into the car and drives away. Then Sawkatewa says he went to the plane to see, and he hears you running up, so he goes away."

  "What did the man unload out of the airplane?"

  Cowboy relayed the question. Sawkatewa made a shape with his hands, perhaps thirty inches long, perhaps eighteen inches high, and provided a description in Hopi with a few English words thrown in. Chee recognized "aluminum" and "suitcase."

  "He said there were two things that looked like aluminum suitcases. About so"—Cowboy demonstrated an aluminum suitcase with his hands—"by so."

  "He didn't say what he did with them," Chee said. "Put them in the car, I guess."

  Cowboy asked.

  Sawkatewa shook his head. Spoke. Cowboy looked surprised.

  "He said he didn't think he put them in the car."

  "Didn't put the suitcases in the car? What the hell did he do with them?"

  Sawkatewa spoke again without awaiting a translation.

  "He said he disappeared in the dark with them. Just gone a little while. Off in the darkness where he couldn't see anything."

  "How long is a little while? Three minutes? Five? It couldn't have been very long. I got there about twenty minutes after the plane hit."

  Cowboy relayed the question. Sawkatewa shrugged. Thought. Said something.

  "About as long as it takes to boil an egg hard. That's what he says."

  "What did the man look like?"

  Sawkatewa had not been close enough to see him well in the bad light. He saw only shape and movement.

  Outside, the rain had gone now. Drifted off to the east. They could hear it muttering its threats and promises back over Black Mesa. But the village stones dripped with water, and muddy rivulets ran here and there over the stone track, and the rocks reflected wet in the headlights of Cowboy's car. Maybe a quarter inch, Chee thought. A heavy shower, but not a real rain. Enough to dampen the dust, and wash things off, and help a little. Most important, there had to be a first rain before the rainy season could get going.

  "You think he knows what he's talking about?" Cowboy asked. "You think that guy didn't load the dope into the car?"

  "I think he told us what he saw," Chee said.

  "Doesn't make sense," Cowboy said. He pulled the patrol car out of a skid on the slick track. "You really going to haul that cement out there for him to plug up the well?"

  "I refuse to answer on grounds that it might tend to incriminate me," Chee said.

  "Hell," Cowboy said. "That won't do me any good. You got me in so deep now, I'm just going to pretend I never heard any of that."

  "I'll pretend, too," Chee said.

  "If he didn't haul those suitcases off in that car, how the devil did he haul them out?"

  "I don't know," Chee said. "Maybe he didn't."

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chee had noticed the tracks when he first turned off the asphalt onto the graded dirt road which passed the Burnt Water Trading Post and wandered northeastward up Wepo Wash. The tracks meant only that someone was up even earlier than he was. They meant a vehicle had come this way since last night's shower. It was only when he noticed the tread marks on the damp sand on the wash bottom that he became interested. He stopped his pickup and got out for a closer look. The tires were almost new, the tread common to heavy passenger cars and pickup trucks. Chee memorized them, more from habit than intention, the reflex of a life way in which memory is important. Deputy Sheriff Dashee might be making this trip this morning, but Dashee's tires were Goodyears and this tread Firestone. Who would be driving up Wepo Wash at dawn? Where would they be going, except to the site of the plane crash? Ironfingers returning to the scene of his crime? Chee drove slowly, keeping his engine noise down and his eyes open. As soon as the early light permitted, he flicked off his headlights. Twice he stopped and listened. He heard nothing except the sound of morning birds, busy with their first post-rain day. He stopped again, at the place where a side arroyo provided the exit route to the track that led to his windmill. The fresh tire tracks continued up-wash. Chee pulled his pickup to the right, up the arroyo. He had a good official reason to visit the windmill. He'd been warned to stay away from the airplane.

  A flock of crows had occupied the windmill area and the sentinel, perched atop the stationary directional vane, cawed out a raucous alarm as Chee drove up. He parked, more or less out of sight, behind the water tank, and walked directly to the shrine. The parched earth had soaked in most of the rain, but the fall had been abrupt enough to produce runoff an inch or so deep down the arroyo bottom, sweeping it clean. There were no fresh tracks.

  Chee took his time, making frequent stops to listen. He was near the point where the arroyo drained into Wepo Wash when he first saw footprints. He inspected them. Someone had walked about one hundred fifty yards up the arroyo, and then down again. The arroyo mouth was a bit less than a quarter mile upwash from the crash site. Chee stood behind the heavy brush which had flourished there. A white Chevy Blazer was parked by the wreckage. Two men were in view. He recognized Collins, the blond who'd handcuffed him in his trailer, but the other man was only vaguely familiar. He was heavyset, a little short of middle age and beginning to show it, dressed in khaki pants and shirt and wearing a long-billed cap. He and Collins were about fifty yards apart. They were searching along the opposite bank of the wash, poking into the brush and examining crevices. Collins was working down-wash, away from where Chee stood. The other man moved upwash toward Chee. Where had he seen him before? It seemed to have been recently, or fairly so. Probably another federal cop from somewhere. While he thought about it, he heard footsteps on the sand.

  Chee ducked back into the brush, squatting to make himself less visible. From that position, he could see only part of the man who walked just past the mouth of the arroyo. But he saw enough to recognize Johnson, walking slowly, carrying a driftwood stick.

  Johnson stopped. Chee couldn't see his upper torso, but the way his hips pivoted, the man seemed to be looking up the arroyo. Chee tensed. Held his breath. Then Johnson turned away.

  "Finding anything?"

  Chee heard only one answer. A voice, which might have been Collins's, shouting, "Nothing."

  Johnson's legs moved quickly out of view down the wash.

  Chee moved back to the mouth of the arroyo, cautious. Until he could locate Johnson, the man might be anywhere. He heard the dea agent's voice near the crash site and breathed easier. He could see all three men now, standing under the uptilted wing, apparently discussing things. Then they climbed into the vehicle, Johnson driving. With a spinning of wheels on the damp sand, it made a sweeping turn and roared off down the wash. If they'd found any aluminum suitcases, they hadn't loaded them into the Blazer.

  Chee spent a quarter of an hour making sure he knew where and how Johnson and friends had searched. Last night's runoff down Wepo Wash had been shallow but it had swept the sand clean. Every mark made this morning was as easy to see as a chalk mark on a clean blackboard. Johnson and friends had made a careful search up and down the cliffs of the wash and around the basalt upthrust. Brush had been poked under, driftwood moved, crevices examined. No place in which a medium-sized suitcase might have been hidden was overlooked.

  Chee sat under the wing and thought his thoughts. In the wake of the shower the morning was humid, with patches of fog still being burned off the u
pper slopes of Big Mountain. A few wispy white clouds already were signaling that it might be another afternoon of thunderheads. He took his notebook out of his pocket and reread the notes he'd made yesterday. On the section where he'd written "Dashee" he added another remark: "Johnson learns immediately what old Hopi told us. How?"

  He looked at the question. When Cowboy had returned to Flagstaff he'd typed up a report, just as Chee had done at Tuba City. Johnson obviously had learned about the suitcases during the night. From Dashee? From whoever was on night duty at the sheriff's office?

  Chee closed the notebook and muttered a Navajo imprecation. What difference did it make? He wasn't really suspicious of Cowboy. His thinking was going in all the wrong directions. "Everything has a right direction to it," his uncle would have told him. "You need to do it sunwise. From the east, toward the south, to the west, and finally around to the north. That's the way the sun goes, that's the way you turn when you walk into a hogan, that's the way everything works. That's the way you should think." And what the devil did his uncle's abstract Navajo generality mean in this case? It meant, Chee thought, that you should start in the beginning, and work your way around to the end.

  So where was the beginning? People with cocaine in Mexico. People in the United States who wanted to buy it. And someone who worked for one group or the other, who knew of a good, secret place to land an airplane. Joseph Musket or young West, or maybe even both of them plus the elder West. Musket is released from prison, and comes to Burnt Water, and sets up the landing.

  Chee paused, sorting it out.

  Then the dea gets wind of something. Johnson visits West at the prison, threatens him, sets him up to be killed.

  Chee paused again, fished out the notebook, turned to the proper place, and scribbled in: "Johnson sets up West to be killed? If so, why?"

  Then, a couple of days later, John Doe is killed on Black Mesa, maybe by Ironfingers Musket. Maybe by a witch. Or maybe Ironfingers is a witch. Or maybe there was absolutely no connection between Doe and anything else. Maybe he was simply a stray, an accidental victim of evil. Maybe. Chee doubted it. Nothing in his Navajo conditioning prepared him to accept happily the fact that coincidences sometimes happen.

  He skipped past Doe, leaving everything about him unresolved, and came to the night of the crash. Three men must have been in the gmc when it arrived. One of them must have been already dead. A corpse already seated in the back seat and the other man a prisoner held at pistol point. Held by Ironfingers? Two outsiders coming in to oversee the delivery of the cocaine. Meeting Musket to be guided to the landing site. Musket killing one, keeping the other one alive.

  Why? Because only this man knew how to signal a safe landing to the pilot. That would be why. And after the signal had been flashed, killing the man. Why would Ironfingers leave one body and hide the other? To give the owners of the dope a misleading impression about who had stolen it? Possibly. Chee thought about it. The business about the body had bothered Chee from the first and it bothered him now. Musket, or whoever had been the driver, must have planned to bury it eventually. Why else the shovel? But why bury it when it would be easier to carry it back into some arroyo and leave it for the scavengers?

  Chee got up, took out his pocket knife, and opened its longest blade. With that, he probed into the bed of the wash near where he had sat. The blade sank easily into the damp sand. But two inches below the surface, the earth was compact. He looked around him. The basalt upthrust was a barrier around which runoff water swirled. There the bottom would be irregular. In some places the current would cut deeply after hard rains, only to have the holes filled in by the slower drainage after lesser storms. Chee climbed out of the wash and hurried back to his pickup at the windmill. From behind the front seat he extracted the jack handle—a long steel bar bent at one end to provide leverage for a lug wrench socket and flattened into a narrow blade at the other to facilitate prying off hub caps. Chee took it back to the wash.

  It took just a few minutes to find what he was looking for. The place had to be behind the basalt, because old Taylor Sawkatewa had said the man who unloaded the suitcases had taken them out of sight in the darkness. Chee probed into the damp sand no more than twenty times before he struck aluminum.

  There was the thunk of steel on the thin metal of the case. Chee probed again, and again, and found the second case. He knelt and dug back the sand with his hand. The cases were buried upright, side by side, with their handles no more than six inches below the surface.

  Chee carefully refilled the little holes his jack handle had made, replaced the sand he had dug away with his hands, patted it to the proper firmness, and then took out his handkerchief and brushed away the traces he'd left on the surface. Then he walked over the cache. It felt no different from the undisturbed sand. Finally he spent almost an hour making himself a little broom of rabbit brush and carefully erasing the tracks of Jimmy Chee from the bottom of Wepo Wash. If anyone ever tracked him, they'd find only that he had come down the arroyo to the wash, and then gone back up it again to the windmill. And driven away.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The dispatcher reached chee just as he turned off the Burnt Water-Wepo Wash road onto the pavement of Navajo Route 3. She had a tip from the Arizona Highway Patrol. One of their units had watched Priscilla Bisti and her boys loading six cases of wine into her pickup truck at Winslow that morning. Mrs. Bisti had been observed driving northward toward the Navajo Reservation on Arizona 58.

  "What time?"

  "About ten-fourteen," the dispatcher said.

  "Anything else?"

  "No."

  "Can you check my desk and see if I got any telephone messages?"

  "I'm not supposed to," the dispatcher said. The dispatcher was Shirley Topaha. Shirley Topaha was just two years out of Tuba City High School, where she had been a cheerleader for the Tuba City Tigers. She had pretty eyes, and very white teeth, and perfect skin, and a plump figure. Chee had noticed all this, along with her tendency to flirt with all officers, visitors, prisoners, etc., requiring only that they be male.

  "The captain won't notice it," Chee said. "It might save me a lot of time. It would really be nice if you did."

  "I'll call you back," the dispatcher said.

  That came about five minutes later. It came about two minutes after Chee had turned his patrol car westward toward Moenkopi and Tuba City. Which was too bad, because it meant he had to stop and turn around.

  "Two calls," Shirley said. "One says call Johnson, Drug Enforcement Agency, and there's this number in Flagstaff." She gave him the number. "And the other says please call Miss Pauling at the Hopi motel."

  "Thanks, Shirley," Chee said.

  "Ten-four," said Shirley.

  The man at the desk of the Hopi Cultural Center motel rang Miss Pauling's telephone five times and declared that she wasn't in. Chee checked the motel dining room. She was sitting at a corner table, a cup of coffee in front of her, immersed in a Phoenix Gazette.

  "You left a call for me," Chee said. "Did Gaines come back?"

  "Yes," Miss Pauling said. "Sit down. Do you know how to tap a telephone?" She looked intense, excited.

  "Tap a telephone?" Chee sat down. "What's going on?"

  "There was a message for Gaines," Miss Pauling said. "Someone called and left it. They'd call back at four, and if he wanted me to make an arrangement, to be in his room to take the call."

  "The clerk showed you the message?"

  "Sure," she said. "He checked us in together, and we got adjoining rooms. But we don't have much time." She glanced at her watch. "Less than half an hour. Can we get the telephone tapped?"

  "Miss Pauling," Chee said. "This is Second Mesa, Arizona. I don't know how to tap a telephone."

  "I think it's easy," she said.

  "It looks easy on television," Chee said. "But you have to have some sort of equipment. And you have to know how."

  "You could call somebody?"

  "Not and get a telephone ta
pped in anything less than about three days," Chee said. "In the Navajo Police, it's out of our line of work. If you call the fbi in Phoenix, they'd know how, but they'd have to get a court order." And then, Chee thought, there's Johnson of the dea, who wouldn't worry about a court order, and would probably have the equipment in his hip pocket. He wondered why Johnson wanted him to call. Whatever, it was a call he didn't intend to make.

  Miss Pauling looked stricken. She worried her lower lip with her teeth.

  "How about just listening at the wall?" Chee asked. "Where do they put the telephones? Could you hear from one room to the next?"

  Miss Pauling thought about it. "I doubt it," she said. "Not even if he talked loud."

  Chee glanced at his watch. It was 3:33 p.m. In twenty-seven minutes, more or less, Ironfingers would be calling Ben Gaines, making arrangements to trade two aluminum suitcases full of cocaine for… for what? Probably for a huge amount of money. Whatever he exchanged it for, Musket would have to name a time and a place. Chee wished fervently that he had the clips and the earphones, or whatever it took to eavesdrop on a telephone call.

  "Could we tell the guy at the switchboard that when the call came, Gaines would be in your room? Have him put it through your telephone?"

  "Wouldn't work," Miss Pauling said.

  Chee had seen it wouldn't work as soon as he'd said it. "Not unless I could imitate Gaines's voice."

  Miss Pauling shook her head. "You couldn't," she said.

  "I guess not," Chee said. He thought.

  "What are you thinking about? Anything helpful?"

  "No," Chee said. "I was thinking it would be good if we could get in the back of that telephone switchboard and somehow do some splicing with the wires." He shrugged, dismissing the thought.

  "No," Miss Pauling said. "I think it's a GTE board. It takes tools."

  Chee looked at her, surprised. "GTE board?"

  "I think so. It looked like the one we had at the high school."