He turned to look at Winsor. “See anything there you don’t want to see?”
“No. How about you?”
“Looked good,” Budge said, and banked again, completing the circle, leveling off toward the southwest into the landing approach position.
“When we get on the ground, you can leave most of that luggage stowed away. We won’t be here more than 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 a turn somewhere. Seems we might be going in the wrong direction.”
“Looks like it.”
“Then let’s stop the next place we get to and ask directions,” Dashee suggested.
“The next place we get to is Antelope Wells. That’s the port of entry on the Mexican border, and it’s about fifty miles south of here, and the last twenty or so, according to this map, are marked unimproved.”
Dashee pulled his BLM truck off the road, parked it among the scattered creosote bushes, and got out.
“Here’s my plan,” he said. “We turn around and head back toward where we came from. You do the driving and I’ll do the navigating. Give me your map. It is well known among us Hopis, and all other tribes, that Navajos aren’t to be relied upon when it comes to understanding maps.”
And so it happened, that it was late morning when Chee finally yelled, “Yes, this is it. I remember driving right past that bunch of mesquite over there. And that soaptree yucca. Take that little right turn there, and up that set of tracks, and up that hill, and from there we can see the Tuttle Ranch south gate.”
“Well, good,” Dashee said. “Getting there on Navajo Time, we other Indians say, means late. But better late than never.”
At the top of the hill they could indeed see the gate, and it was open.
“Maybe I wouldn’t have needed you,” Chee said. “I could have driven right in.”
“No, you’d still be lost. And you’d be asked for your jurisdiction credentials right away, and tossed right out again.”
“Anyway, through the gate and over two hills and then we’re there,” Chee said. “I measured it on my odometer. A fraction less than four miles to go.”
It proved to be 3.7 miles from the gate to the hilltop from which they could see the construction site. And the new building. A dark green Border Patrol pickup was parked behind it.
“Chee said: “Son of a bitch!”
Dashee gave Chee a wry look.
“Is that what she drives?” he asked. “You think Bernie’s there?”
“I hope not,” Chee said. She must be crazy. Why in God’s name would she come out here again. She knows the dopers have her picture. She knows they think she’s dangerous.”
“Let’s talk about that later,” Dashee said. “Now let’s get right on down there. Let’s hope this case of being late is going to be one of those better-than-never times.”
Dashee pulled the car back onto the track in a flurry of dirt-throwing wheel spinning and headed it down the hill.
24
That morning, Customs Patrol Officer Bernadette Manuelito had pulled her Border Patrol vehicle onto the dusty shoulder of Playas Road, stepped out, taken her jish out of her purse, extracted a little prescription bottle from it, and shook a pinch of corn pollen onto her left palm. She stood a moment, staring eastward toward the Big Hatchet Mountains. A streak of cloud hanging atop the mountain ridge was turned a brilliant yellow by the rising sun, then orange that faded into red. CPO Manuelito sang the chant greeting the sun. She blessed the dawning new day with a sprinkle of pollen and climbed back into the car.
Her prayer this morning, she was thinking, was a bit more fervent than usual. She had set her alarm for five a.m. and left her home in Rodeo very quietly, not wanting to awaken Eleanda, whose regular breathing she could hear in the adjoining bedroom. Ed Henry’s call had come last night just after she’d watched the weather report on the evening news and hit the sack.
The TV weatherman had sent along some hope that maybe tomorrow would be a rainout, and if the Border Patrol actually had such holidays she would certainly enjoy one. Yesterday had been long, tiring, and unproductive, spent with two other CPOs, both male and both experienced, following the tracks of ten or eleven people, presumed to be illegals, northward through the San Bernadino Valley in extreme southeastern Arizona into the edge of the Chiricahuc Mountains.
The afternoon had been hot, with a gusty wind blowing dust up her pant legs and stinging her face. The other officers, a Tohono O’odham local and a White Mountain Apache, had assumed the role of her teachers. They had laughed off her experience as a Navajo police officer and cast her as a green recruit who was probably teachable, but incurably a “girl.” They had explained why the group they were tracking were not merely illegals slipping into the U.S. in search of minimum-wage jobs but were mules carrying illegal products. They drew her attention to the short steps being taken—evidence of carrying heavy loads—and places where these loads were put down presumably when the mules needed rest, and how some of the loads had been the sort of sacks in which marijuana is often carried. Early on Bernie had pointed to the dents in the dirt that might have been caused by luggage, or a frying pan, or some equally logical cooking utensil, but after this had produced only amused looks, she had kept her opinions to herself.
It had been almost sundown before the tracks disappeared beyond hope of retrieval, erased by the increasing wind. The two males, in charge due to seniority—and their own ideas about gender—had decided that they could think of no reason dope importers would be climbing into these empty and roadless mountains. They decided everyone should go home for the evening and tomorrow they would all continue her education by tracking down four pack horses reported to have been seen in Guadalupe Canyon in the Guadalupe Mountains.
Thus Bernie had reached Rodeo exhausted, dusty, dehydrated, and disgruntled. Eleanda had saved some yogurt and a fruit salad for her, and they’d watched the evening news for a while. Bernie had taken her shower, climbed into pajamas and into bed. There she tried not to think of tomorrow’s chore, tried to remember why she had thought joining the Border Control Shadow Wolves unit was such a good idea, and finally comforted herself with a couple of her happier memories of Sergeant Jim Chee. She was just getting sleepy, and was hoping that the weatherman knew what he was talking about, that the already late monsoons might be starting tomorrow, and if it did rain, she wouldn’t be hunting pack horses in a mountain canyon.
That’s when the telephone rang.
“It’s for you,” Eleanda shouted. “The boss.”
Ed Henry, as always, was short and to the point. “Got a schedule change for you tomorrow,” he said. “Cancel that tracking job over in the Guadalupes. They’re predicting rain anyway. I want you to go out to that construction site on the Tuttle Ranch. Get there bright and early. Look around. See what’s happening and let me know.”
“You mean back to that gate? Do you think they’ll let me in this time?”
“They know now it was just a mistake when you followed that truck in there. You didn’t do no harm.”
Bernie spent a moment dealing with her surprise. Then she said a doubtful sounding “OK,” and asked Henry what he was expecting to find. “Am I supposed to be looking for something specific?”
“Bernie,” he said, “I sort of owe you an apology. I’ve been thinking about everything you told me, and it seemed to me that maybe something not quite right might be going on out there. So just go out and take another look around, and give me a call and let me know what you think.”
“Fine.”
“And use that cell phone number I gave you. I got some running around to do tomorrow so I won’t be in the office. In fact, I’ll be coming out to the Tuttle place myself later in the day. I’ll sort of serve as your backup.” With that, Henry chuckled.
Now, back on the road again with the morning sunlight flooding the valley and clouds beginning to build up over mountains in every direction, Bernie was remembering that chuckle instead of enjoying the vast expanse of beauty. Would it finally rain? That was no longer among the questions on her mind. What kind of thinking had Ed Henry been doing to cause him to reconsider the Tuttle Ranch? What did he think she might find? Why did Henry think the gate would be unlocked this time? That must be because he’d arranged for someone to let her in. Or to let him in. He’d said he was co
ining out himself a little later. That thought reminded her of the picture Henry had taken of her, and what Delos Vasquez had told her about seeing a copy of it held by one of the drug gangs in Mexico.
By the time she reached the hilltop from which she had first looked down upon the gate, she was feeling thoroughly uneasy about this assignment. She unsnapped the strap on her holster, took out her Border Patrol pistol, and confirmed that the magazine was filled with the official number of nine-millimeter rounds of ammunition. She had scored expert at the firing range test she’d taken after applying for this job, just as she’d scored expert on the range with the similar pistol used by the Navajo Tribal Police. But she’d been shooting at targets. She’d never shot at anything alive. Certainly not at a fellow human. Could she if she had to? Maybe, she thought. Probably she could do it. She checked the safety, put the pistol back in the holster, took her binoculars out of their case, and got out of the truck.
The gate was not only unlocked, it was standing open. No vehicles anywhere around it, none in sight in any direction. No humans either, no horses, and no oryx. She focused again on the gate. Wide open. Beckoning her. She found herself wishing to see Mr. O’day driving up, wishing he would tell her she absolutely could not come in without a personal invitation from the owner and he didn’t give a damn what her supervisor had told her. She gave Mr. O’day a few seconds to arrive at the gate. He didn’t. She climbed back into her vehicle, rolled it down the hill through the gate, and drove slowly up the hill beyond it, and over it to the top of the next hill. There she stopped again and looked at the construction site below. No sign of motion. She got out the binoculars, stood beside the car, and studied the place.
No vehicles there, either. The construction crew was gone but it was obvious it hadn’t been idle. The major change was the addition of a rectangular building, apparently a modified form of a mobile home. The small windmill that had been laying on the ground in sections on her first visit was now mounted atop the building, its blades turning slowly in the mild breeze. She scanned the surroundings carefully, changing the binocular’s focus as the circle widened. Off to her left she caught motion. Focused again. Four oryx, running down the slope into the playa, where, from what she’d been told, they found water. All the animals seemed to be either immatures or females. At least none was carrying that great curved horn, the declaration of male oryx machismo, like the one she’d photographed. No horn. No other sign of life. She drove down the trail to the construction site.
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