A Thief of Time jlajc-8

by Tony Hillerman

  'Jesus didn't let Death live. Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!' Nakai danced across the platform, shouting, drawing from the audience answering shouts. 'When we walk through the Valley of Death, he is with us, that's what Jesus teaches. We don't just drift away into the dark night, a ghost of sickness. We go beyond death. We go into a happy world. We go where there ain't no hunger. There ain't no sorrow. Ain't no drunks. No fighting. No seeing relatives run over out here on the highway. We go into a world where last are first, and the poor are the rich, and the sick are well, and the blind, they see again…'

  Leaphorn didn't hear the last of it. He was hurrying out through the tent flap into the darkness. He stood for a while, allowing his eyes to adjust, breathing the cool, clean high-altitude air. Smelling dust, and sagebrush, shaken, remembering the day they brought Emma's body home from the hospital.

  It had still been unreal to him, what had happened at Gallup, what the doctor had told him. It had left him stunned. Emma's brothers had come to talk to him about it. He'd simply told them that he knew Emma would want a traditional burial, and they'd left.

  They'd taken the body to her mother's place over near Blue Gap Chapter House, on the edge of Black Mesa. Under the brush arbor her old aunt had washed her, and combed out her hair, and dressed her in her best blue velvet skirt, and her old squash-blossom necklace, put on her rings, and wrapped her in a blanket. He had sat in the hogan, watching. Her brothers had picked her up then, and put the body in the back of their truck, and driven down the track toward the cliffs. In about an hour they came back without her and took their cleansing sweat bath. He didn't know--would never know-- where they'd left her. In a crevice somewhere, probably. High. Protected by deadwood from the predators. Hidden away. He had stayed for two days of the silent days of mourning. Tradition demanded four days, to give the dead time to complete their journey into the oblivion of death. Two days was all he could stand. He'd left them.

  And her. But no more of this.

  Chee's pickup was still there. Leaphorn walked to it.

  'Ya te'eh,' Chee said, acknowledging him.

  'Ya te,' Leaphorn said. He leaned on the truck door. 'What brings you out to the Reverend Slick Nakai's revival?'

  Chee explained about the backhoe loader, and the abortive chase, and what Tso had told him about where the Backhoe Bandit might be found.

  'But I don't think he is going to show up tonight,' Chee said. 'Getting too late.'

  'You going to go in and ask Nakai who this fellow is?' Leaphorn asked.

  'I'm going to do that,' Chee said. 'When he's through preaching and when I get a look at the people coming out of the tent.'

  'You think Nakai would tell you he didn't know this guy, and then tip him off you're looking for him?'

  Long silence. 'He might,' Chee said. 'But I think I'll risk it.'

  Leaphorn didn't comment. It was the decision he would have made. Handle it on Navajo time. No reason to rush in there.

  There was no hurry for him either, but he went back into the tent. He'd hear the rest of Nakai's sermon, and see how much money he took in at his collection. And how many, if any, pots. Leaphorn was thinking that maybe he'd learned a little more than he'd first realized. Something had jogged his memory. The thin Navajo with the guitar was the same man he'd seen helping Maxie Davis at the excavation at Chaco Canyon. That answered one small question. A Christian Navajo wouldn't be worrying about stirring up the chindi of long-dead Anasazi. But it also made an interesting connection--a man who dug up scientific pots at Chaco worked for a man who sold theoretically legal pots. And a man who sold theoretically legal pots linked to a man who stole a backhoe. Backhoes were machines notoriously useful in uprooting Anasazi ruins and despoiling their graves.

  It was just about then, as he walked out of the darkness into the tent, that he became aware of something in his attitude about all this.

  He felt an urgency now. The disappearance of Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal had been merely something curious--an oddity. Now he sensed something dangerous. He had never been sure he could find the woman. Now he wondered if she'd be alive if he did.

  Chapter Five

  Ť ^ ť

  REMEMBER, BOY,' Uncle Frank Sam Nakai would sometimes tell Chee, 'when you're tired of walking up a long hill you think about how easy it's going to be walking down.' Which was Nakai's Navajo way of saying things tend to even up. For Chee this proved, as his uncle's aphorisms often did, to be true. Chee's bad luck was followed by good luck.

  Early Monday a San Juan County sheriffs deputy, who happened to have read the paperwork about the stolen flatbed trailer and backhoe, also happened to get more or less lost while trying to deliver a warrant. He turned off on an access road to a Southern Union pump site and found the trailer abandoned. The backhoe apparently had been unloaded, driven about twenty yards on its own power, and then rolled up a makeshift ramp--presumably into the back of a truck. The truck had almost new tires on its dual rear wheels. The tread pattern was used by Dayton Tire and Rubber, with a single dealer in Farmington and none in Shiprock. The dealer had no trouble remembering. The only truck tires he sold for a month had been to Farmington U-Haul. The company had three trucks out at the moment with dual rear wheels. Two had been recently reshod with Daytons. One was rented to a Farmington furniture company. The other, equipped with a power winch, was rented to Joe B. Nails, P.O. Box 770, Aztec, using a MasterCard.

  Farmington police had a record on Nails. One driving while intoxicated. It was enough to provide an employer's name. Wellserve, Inc., a contractor maintaining the Gasco collection system. But Wellserve was a former employer. Nails had quit in August.

  Chee learned all of this good news secondhand. He'd spent the morning hanging around Red Rock, worrying about what he'd tell Janet Pete when she got back from Phoenix, and waiting for a witness he was supposed to deliver to the FBI office in Farmington. With that done two hours behind schedule, he had stopped at the Shiprock headquarters and got the first half of the news about the trailer. He'd spent the afternoon hunting around Teec Nos Pos for a fellow who'd broken his brother-in-law's leg. No luck on that. When he pulled back into Shiprock to knock off for the day, he ran into Benally going off shift.

  'I guess we got your Backhoe Bandit,' Benally said. And he filled Chee in on the rest of it. 'U-Haul calls us when he checks the truck in.'

  That struck Chee as stupid. 'You think he'll have the backhoe in it when he returns it?' Chee said. 'Otherwise, no proof of anything. What you charge him with?'

  Benally had thought of that and so had Captain Largo.

  'We bring him in. We tell him we have witnesses who saw him taking the thing out, and we can connect it to the truck he rented, and if he'll cooperate and tell us where it is so we can recover it, and snitch on his buddy, then we go light on him.' Benally shrugged, not thinking it would work either. 'Better than nothing,' he added. 'Anyway, the call's out on the U-Haul truck. Maybe we catch him with the backhoe in it.'

  'I doubt it,' Chee said.

  Benally agreed. He grinned. 'The best plan would have been for you to have grabbed him when he was driving out of the yard with it.'

  Chee called Pete's office from the station phone. He'd break it by degrees. Tell her first that a lot of things were wrong with the Buick, sort of slip into the part about tearing it up. But Miss Pete wasn't in, wasn't back from Phoenix, had called in and said she'd be held over for a day.

  Wonderful. Chee felt immense relief. He put the Buick out of his mind. He thought about the Backhoe Bandit, who was going to get away with it. He thought about what the preacher had told him Saturday night.

  The preacher said he didn't know the name of the man who owned the patched-up car. He thought he'd heard him called Jody, or maybe Joey. He thought the man worked in the Blanco field--maybe for Southern Union Gas, but maybe not. The man sometimes brought him a pot which the preacher said he sometimes bought. The last time he saw him, the man had asked if the preacher would buy a whole bunch of pots if the m
an could get them. 'And I told him maybe I could and maybe I couldn't. It would depend on whether I had any money.'

  'So maybe he'll come back again and maybe he won't.'

  'I think he'll be back,' the preacher had said. 'I told him if I couldn't handle it, I knew somebody who could.' And he told Chee about the woman anthropologist, and that led him to Lieutenant Leaphorn. The preacher was a talkative man.

  Chee sat now in his pickup truck beside the willows shading the police parking lot. He felt relief on one hand, pressure on the other. The dreaded meeting with Janet Pete was off, at least until tomorrow. But when it came, he wanted to conclude his story by telling Pete how he had nailed the man to blame for all this. It didn't seem likely that was going to happen. Largo's solution was sensible if you were patient, even though it probably wouldn't produce an indictment. Aside from what it had done to Chee, the crime was relatively minor. Theft of equipment worth perhaps $10,000 in its badly used condition. Hardly an event to provoke all-out deployment of police to run down evidence. So the Backhoe Bandit would get away with it. Unless the rent-a-truck could be found with the backhoe on it. Where would it be?

  Chee shifted sideways in the seat, leaned a knee against the dashboard, thought. Nails was a pot hunter. Probably he wanted the backhoe for digging up burials to find a lot of them. With the teeth removed from the shovel to minimize breakage, they were a favorite tool of the professionals. And from what the preacher said, Nails must be going professional. He must have found a likely ruins. What Nails had told the preacher suggested he'd found a wholesale source. Therefore it was a safe presumption that he'd stolen the backhoe to dig them.

  So far it was easy. The hard question was where?

  The willow branches dangling around Chee's pickup had turned yellow with the season. Chee studied them a moment to rest the brain. Surely he must know something helpful. How about the trailer? Stolen. Then brought back to haul out the backhoe. Then abandoned in favor of the truck? The night the trailer was stolen the backhoe was still being repaired. Had the head off the engine, in fact. So they took the trailer, and brought it back when the backhoe was ready to roll. Pretty stupid, on the face of it. But Chee had checked and learned the trailer was scheduled to haul equipment to a job at Burnt Water the next day. The Backhoe Bandit knew a hell of a lot about what went on in that maintenance yard. Interesting, but it didn't help now.

  The next answers did. The question was why steal the trailer at all? Why not simply rent the U-Haul truck earlier, and haul the backhoe out on that? And why not rent the backhoe, instead of stealing it? As Chee thought it through, the answers connected. Rental trucks were easy to trace, so the Backhoe Bandit avoided the risk of having the truck seen at the burglary. A rented backhoe would also be easy to trace. But there would be no reason to trace it if it was checked back in after it was used. So why… ? Chee's orderly mind sorted through it. The truck was needed instead of the trailer because the trailer couldn't be pulled where the backhoe was needed. Could it be the dig site was somewhere from which the backhoe couldn't be extricated? Of course. It would be at the bottom of someplace, and that would explain why Nails had rented a truck with a power winch. Running a backhoe down the steep slope of a canyon could well be possible where pulling it out wouldn't be.

  Chee climbed out of the cab, trotted into the office, and called the Farmington office of Wellserve, Inc. Yes, they could provide the police with a copy of their well-service route map. Yes, the service superintendent could mark the route Nails had served.

  When Chee left Wellserve with the map folded on the seat beside him he had three hours left before sundown. Then there would be a half-moon. A good night for a pot hunter to work, and a good night to hunt pot hunters. He stopped at the sheriffs office and found out who was patrolling where tonight. If Nails was off reservation land, he'd need a deputy along to make an arrest. Then he drove up the San Juan River valley through the little oil town of Bloomfield, and out of the valley into the infinity of sagebrush that covers the Blanco Plateau. He was remembering he'd read somewhere of somebody estimating more than a hundred thousand Anasazi sites on the Colorado Plateau--only a few of them excavated, only a few thousand even mapped. But it wouldn't be impossible. He would guess Nails had found sites along the service roads he traveled and would be looting them. Chee knew some of those sites himself. And he knew what attracted the Anasazi. A cliff faced to catch the winter sun and shaded in the summer, enough floodplain to grow something, and a source of water. That, particularly the water, narrowed it a lot.

  He scouted Canyon Largo first, and Blanco Canyon, and Jasis Canyon. He found two sites that had been dug into fairly recently. But nothing new and no sign of the tire tread pattern he was looking for. He moved north then and checked Gobernador Canyon and La Jara and the Vaqueros Wash eastward in the Carson National Forest. He found nothing. He skipped westward, driving far faster than the speed limit down New Mexico Highway 44. The light was dying now--a cloudless autumn evening with the western sky a dull copper glow. He checked out a couple of canyons near Ojo Encino, restricting himself always to the access roads gouged out to reach the gas wells and pump stations Nails had been serving.

  By midnight he finished checking the roads leading from the Star Lake Pump Station, driving slowly, using his flashlight to check for tracks at every possible turnoff. He circled back past the sleeping trading post the maps called White Horse Lake. He crossed the Continental Divide, and dropped into the network of arroyos that drain Chaco Mesa. Again he found nothing. He circled back across Chaco Wash and picked up the gravel road that leads northwestward toward Nageezi Trading Post.

  Beyond Betonnie Tsosie Wash he stopped the pickup in the middle of the road. He climbed out wearily, stretched, and turned on the flash to check the turnoff of an access trail. He stood in the light of the half-moon, yawning, his flash reflecting from the chalky dust. It showed, clear and fresh, the dual tracks of an almost new Dayton tire tread.

  Chee's watch showed 2:04 A.M. At 2:56 he found the place where, maybe a thousand years ago, a little band of Anasazi families had lived, and built their cluster of small stone shelters and living spaces, and died. Chee had been walking for more than a mile. He had left his pickup by a pump site and followed the twin tracks on foot. The pump marked the dead end of this branch of the service road -- if two ruts wandering through the sage and juniper could be called that. From here, the dual tires had made their own road. Away from the hard-packed ruts, they were easy to follow now -- crushed tumbleweeds, broken brush, the sharp smell of bruised sage.

  They led up a long slope, and Chee guessed they wouldn't lead far. He walked carefully and quietly, moon over his shoulder, flash off. The slow huffing of the pump motor diminished behind him. He stopped, listening for the sound the backhoe motor would be making. He heard a coyote, and then its partner. One behind him, one on the ridge to his left. It was work time for predators, with all the little nocturnal rodents out braving death to find a meal.

  He didn't see the truck until he was within fifty feet of it. Nails had nosed it into a cluster of juniper just over the crest of the hill. The doors of its van box stood open, a square black shape with the ramp used to unload the backhoe still in place. Chee stared, listening, feeling a mixture of excitement, exultation, and uneasiness. He put his hand on the pistol in his jacket pocket. Chee did not like pistols in general, and the one he had carried since being sworn into the force was no exception. But now the heavy hard metal was reassuring. He walked to the truck, placing each step carefully, stopping to listen. The cab was empty, the doors unlocked. The wire cable from the winch spool extended down the steep slope, slack. If the backhoe was down there, as it must be, the engine wasn't running. The silence was almost total. From far behind him, he could hear the faint sound of the walking beam pump. No coyote sounds now. The air was moving up the slope past his face, a faint coolness.

  Chee held the cable in his left hand and started down the slope, following the path broken by the backhoe, t
rying to keep his weight on his feet, trying to avoid the noise sliding would make.

  The slope was too steep. He slid a few feet, regained control. Slid again as the earth gave way under his feet. Then he lay on his back, motionless, breathing dust, cursing under his breath at the noise he had made. He listened, hand gripping the cable. Down here under the ridge, he could no longer hear the distant pump motor. The coyote yipped somewhere off to his left and provoked an answering yip from its partner. He saw the backhoe, partially visible through the brush, its motor silent. The half-moon lit the roof of its cab, the shovel, and part of the jointed arm that controlled it. Nails apparently had been frightened away. It didn't matter. He had the backhoe. He had the truck that had hauled it here, and the record would show Nails had rented the truck.

  Chee gripped the cable and shifted his free hand to push himself erect. He felt cloth under his fingers. And a button. And the hard bone and cold skin of a wrist. He scrambled away from it.

  The form lay facedown, head upslope, in the deep darkness cast by a juniper--its left hand stretching out toward the cable. A man, Chee saw. He squatted, controlling the shock. And when it was controlled, he leaned forward and felt the wrist.

  Dead. Dead long enough to be stiff. He bent low over the corpse and turned on his flash. It wasn't Nails. It was a Navajo. A young man, hair cut short, wearing a blue checked shirt with two stains on its back. Chee touched one of them with a tentative finger. Stiff. Dried blood. The man had apparently been shot twice. In the middle of the back and just above the hip.

  Chee snapped off the light. He thought of the Navajo's ghost, hovering nearby. He turned his mind away from that. The chindi was out there, representing all that was evil in the dead man's being. But one did not think of chindis out in the darkness. Where was Nails? Most likely, hours away from here. But why did he leave the truck? This Navajo must be the one seen with Nails when they'd stolen the backhoe. Maybe the Navajo had driven the truck, Nails had come in his own car. Odd, but possible.