“Yá’át’ééh abíní, Jake,” she said.
“I hope I’m not bothering you two this morning,” Bilagody said, “but I was hoping to speak with our resident stunt driver.”
Sharon smiled. “Hold on.” She handed Arthur the phone.
“What’s up?”
“I wanted to tell you we pulled a latent print off that gum wrapper you found.”
“How’d you manage to do that?” Arthur glanced at Sharon.
Jake said, “I figured if we’re going to have a chance at solving this before someone else gets killed, we don’t have months to wait for a lab—they’re overworked and underfunded. I simply decided to go a different route.”
“And what route was that?”
“I have this new officer here, Alicia Tom, and she had this crazy idea she could help. She saw me staring at that damn baggie with the wrapper in it the other day and mumbling to myself and told me if I couldn’t come up with an answer, maybe she could.”
“That’s taking a helluva risk with possible evidence.”
“Yeah, well, that risk paid off,” Jake expressed confidently. “The next day she brought in a small plastic container—the kind you’d put leftovers in—and a bottle of iodine crystals.”
Arthur tapped the speaker function on his cell phone so Sharon could hear what Jake was saying. “Iodine crystals?” Arthur repeated.
“She does a lot of backpacking and uses them to purify water. Anyway, she sprinkles some of these crystals in the container and puts the wrapper inside using tweezers from her purse and closes the lid.” Jake paused briefly to grab a breath of air before continuing. “Then she went over to the sink and poured some steaming hot water into a pot and floated the container in it.”
Arthur could hear the excitement building in the cop’s voice, and he smiled at Sharon. She smiled back and said softly, “Girl sure sounds resourceful.”
Ak’is still paid them all no mind. He was enjoying relaxing on his parents’ bed for a change. He wasn’t usually allowed on the giant bed, and he was going to take full advantage of it.
“Arthur, I’ll be damned if after a few minutes I couldn’t see some vapors floating around inside that container! And after about five minutes, she pulls the container out of the water, dries it off, and opens it. She pulls out your wrapper with the tweezers and lays it on the counter, and I’ll be damned again if you couldn’t see fingerprints! Kind of a brownish orange, but there they were. Had some pretty good ridge detail, too.”
“So you plan to give it to our FBI pal Thorne with prints already developed on it?”
“That’s the best part!” Jake said. “The prints were so well formed I had her take digital pictures of them to save them. She said they would probably vanish in a few hours anyway, so by the time I hand them over to the feds, it’ll just look like a plain gum wrapper again. But I’m going to tell them what we did and show them the digital photos, give them my findings and explain that the situation called for fast action.”
“And you think Thorne will be willing to work with you knowing you tampered with evidence?”
“We’ll be just as friendly as the when Democrats and Republicans work together across the aisle.” Jake’s jovial attitude disappeared quickly. “You’re not going to like the result though.”
Arthur and Sharon waited.
Finally, Bilagody said, “You sitting down?”
“Better,” Arthur said. “I’m laying down.”
“When we ran the prints through the system they came back as John Sykes’.”
“No way!” Arthur sat upright in bed. Sharon grabbed the tray. Ak’is did nothing. “I don’t believe you. Run ’em again!”
“What the hell do you think I did?” Jake countered. “I ran them three times and got the same result each time. There’s no way around it. Sykes is our killer. When I turn the wrapper over to the FBI, the first thing they’ll want to do is go out to his place. I’ve already chosen a liaison officer to go with them.”
“Don’t get the feds involved yet,” Arthur said. “I want a chance to talk to John first. Text me his address.”
“That’s about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard you say,” Jake scolded. “What makes you think he won’t kill you? He’s already tried once. And don’t forget someone out there hired him to do it.”
“I can’t explain it, Jake, but if anyone can talk to him, it’ll be me. And we all know who hired him. Elias Dayton.”
“I still say you’re reaching.”
“Look, John’s not stupid. If he’s our killer, and the feds get there before I have a chance to talk to him, he’ll see them coming.” Arthur calmed his voice in order to convey his point. “They’ll never even hear the shots that kill them.”
Arthur heard Jake’s heavy breathing as he contemplated his answer. “You’ve got four hours. Then I call them. I’ll send you the address.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Arthur ended the call and tossed the phone onto the bed. “Damnit!”
Sharon sat motionless and said nothing. When she stood, Arthur grabbed the tray from his lap and quickly swung his legs over the side of the bed, his face wincing from the pain. He sat the tray back on the nightstand and stood, then began to pace back and forth. Ak’is raised his head and watched him. Sharon remained silent as Arthur’s mind began working through the angles and reasons why one of his own men would try to kill him. And what was Sykes’ relationship with the Desert Patriots? Did he believe in all their twisted ideology? Was he part of their security operation? Or was he simply their hired gun?
Arthur stopped pacing. “I have to get out of here. I need to find Sykes and see what he tells me.”
“Are you crazy?” Sharon’s tone became a mixture of anger and astonishment. “If Jake is right, and he took a shot at you, why would you want to give him another chance?”
“Because he could have killed me and he didn’t,” Arthur insisted. “You don’t know him like I do. He wouldn’t have missed. None of us would have missed.”
“You’re in no shape to go anywhere,” Sharon argued. “You just got out of the hospital yesterday.”
Arthur went to look for his pants. Sharon took a deep breath and tried to calm herself as she watched her husband wandering the bedroom. “Where are we going?”
“We are not going anywhere,” Arthur stressed. “I am going somewhere.”
“And what makes you think that? You’re in no condition to drive, and you have no vehicle.”
Arthur removed a pair of jeans from behind the small door in his dark wooden dresser where they had been neatly folded and stacked. He tugged them on, pushing past the pain, then began rifling through their closet for a shirt.
“I can drive just fine,” he said firmly. “I don’t need you with me. I don’t want to put you in danger.” He managed to get a collared shirt on fairly easily but was fighting with his fumbling motor skills to try to button it up. “If Jake is right, I don’t want to risk you getting hurt.”
“Me?” Sharon debated. “Look at you! You can’t even button your shirt.” She moved in front of him and began working each of the buttons into their holes with slender fingers. “I’m going with you, and that’s the end of it. And I’m not taking no for an answer.”
Ak’is rolled over on the bed and made himself comfortable, front legs limply held aloft while his back legs spread wide, displaying very little inhibition and possibly too much pride.
Arthur said, “Those boys became my responsibility after Eddie died. Don’t you get it?” He let Sharon finish buttoning his shirt, then he tucked it into the waistband of his jeans and buckled his leather belt. “It’s my job to find out if John is responsible, and if he is, to take care of it.”
Sharon crossed her arms, as if manning some invisible blockade between husband and wife, and stared at him, her intentions anchored deeply in her dete
rmination. “I’m going with you. I can drive since you don’t have your truck and can’t even seem to button a shirt.”
Arthur raked both hands over his head and tossed his shoulder-blade length black hair behind his back. He searched his wife’s face for any hint of an afterthought, any chink in her armor of seriousness. Seeing none, he stood firm. “I’m fine. And you are not going.”
“You wanna bet?” Sharon’s chest inflated and fell. Arthur could tell she was doing all she could to control her anger. “How much pain are you in?”
“Not much.”
“Bullshit. I can read it in your lacerated face and battered body. You’re not some comic book superhero. You’re a man of flesh and bone.”
Arthur located his boots and moved as quickly as he could past Sharon to get them. Sitting himself on the end of the bed, he began pulling them on. The pain in his body told him she was right as the first boot slammed home, but his stubbornness fought to hide it from her.
Sharon spun around. “Look, I don’t want you to go at all. You need to stay here and rest, but if you insist on going, then you’re taking me.”
“I don’t need you getting hurt.”
“I. Don’t. Care,” Sharon snapped. “All I see is a man who lives by some insane moral code constructed inside his stubborn head that puts everyone else’s needs above his own. Above our own. And I understand that you feel you somehow failed the boys, but you couldn’t have protected them from this.” Sharon stepped closer to where her husband stood after tugging on his other boot. She brought her hands to Arthur’s face and held it as her eyes pleaded with his. “I’m going to drive you, so damn it, let me. I can’t lose you. Not now, not ever.”
Arthur stood looking at the woman before him. She had been the only one who had been able to reach inside his soul and peel away the many layers of hardened military exterior. An exterior that had kept him alive through five Marine tours and twelve years working for CBP. The only woman he had ever met who could bring out in him the man he always hoped was still inside.
“I’m going to ask you again,” Sharon said. “Am I driving you, or are you going to risk your own life behind the wheel?”
Over the last ten years of their marriage, Arthur had become used to finding himself in these types of situations. And he had always felt uncomfortable in them. It reminded him of being in the Marines when they were figuring out strike plans using the ends, ways, means, and risk strategy. He remembered the three-legged stool theory of a plane of varying degrees of risk balancing precariously on top of the three legs representing ends, ways, and means. He quickly calculated the degree of risk regarding this mission and said, “You’re driving.”
* * *
They had been on the road at least half an hour. Arthur was biding his time, watching the sun move behind the sparsely scattered clouds in the sky as it baked the ground below. His eyes followed the ghostly chemtrails of jets as they crossed over each other and expanded into swaths of disappearing vapor. Sharon was heading south on Highway 550 with the visor of her yellow Toyota FJ Cruiser pulled down to shade her eyes.
“I can’t believe I’m riding in this thing,” Arthur mumbled from the passenger seat. “I feel like I’m in a pregnant banana on wheels.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Sharon said. “Besides, it’ll give us time to talk.”
Well, at least she hadn’t said, “We need to talk,” Arthur told him himself. That rarely meant anything good. His gaze returned to staring out of the passenger-side window and admiring the arid scenery as it rolled by. “So they’re fracking the hell out of this area, huh?”
Sharon huffed. “If you think DAPL in the Dakotas was a problem, you should really read up on what’s going on in Dinétah.” Sharon signaled and moved around a slower-moving semi. Arthur hid his face from the driver so as not to be seen in the pregnant banana on wheels.
“Fracking is big business,” Sharon added. “So much so that NMX and a few other companies have seen a huge influx in hiring for this region. Especially around Chaco. Did you know there are seventy thousand oil and gas wells in our homeland right now? And the BLM wants to give the okay to double that amount.” She shook her head. “That’s one hundred and forty thousand needles in the ground, sucking our land dry. Not to mention the thousands of miles of new access roads and plowed pathways for drilling sites. And to top it off, you’ll have thousands of miles of pipelines running everywhere.” Sharon turned up her side of the air-conditioning to combat the one-hundred-and-two-degree temperature attacking the outside of the SUV as they moved through the sweltering San Juan Basin.
“Doesn’t fracking involve pumping liquid into shale deposits?” Arthur said.
“Where’d you hear that?” Sharon said.
“I read an article in the Navajo Times about it, ‘New Mexico: Land of Extraction,’ ” Arthur said. “It was a while back, so don’t ask me when.”
Sharon grinned. “Well, that’s pretty much true. The short version is they pump fluids into shale beds under high pressure so they can extract oil and gas deposits. These fluids are a mixture of water, chemicals, and sand that get injected to reduce friction pressure and create a fracture. The San Juan is loaded with both oil and methane gas deposits.”
“But aren’t the chemicals dangerous? That seems to be the point of all these yellow protest signs I’ve been seeing along the road here.”
“Depends on which side you talk to. One side tells you all the benefits of fracking while the other side offers you just as many detractions. While it is true that methane gas is a great, nontoxic energy source, the opposition is telling you it’s the silent killer everyone should be afraid of.” Sharon reached down and jerked her stainless water bottle from the center console and took a drink. “Methane is highly explosive and has been the cause of a lot of mining and rig explosions in the past. But it also comes from humans and cows in, well, the form of farts.” She briefly turned her head to look at her husband. “All joking aside, it has been known to cause death by asphyxiation if you’re exposed to it for a long enough period of time.”
Sharon hit her signal and passed another semi and a sedan with Indiana plates that had slowed down to let someone inside take photos of the passing geologic splendor outside their car window. Another yellow protest sign passed by Arthur’s window proclaiming “Extraction or Health and Safety?” in bold black letters.
Arthur turned in his seat. “I also read recently about a young boy who had been run over and killed by an oil-company truck. The paper said the truck was traveling fast on a dirt road that even school buses have trouble navigating.”
Sharon lips pursed. “Bottom line is that our people don’t feel protected or properly represented. And it’s because they don’t think they have a voice when it comes to management of federal lands that are next to Tribal Trust lands or any of the allotted lands. And they don’t see any transparency pertaining to what’s been going on with our local leaders.” Sharon shot him a sideways glance. “They’re on their own.”
Arthur surveyed the round crops of NAPI as they passed them by in the distance. The arrogated crop circles of the Navajo Agricultural Products Industry, if you googled them as he had once, would look like discs of browns and grays and greens, all resembling hundreds of long-playing records if you zoomed in close enough. He remembered hearing about the crops of alfalfa, corn, beans, potatoes, and other smaller grains grown there. He had even used their alfalfa mix for his horses. Sure, sometimes it was dirty, but he figured he was living in the desert so what did he expect?
* * *
Should I tell him now? Sharon wondered. She had only seen the therapist once and had walked out. Is it even something I should bring up? Since the medications had worn off, she concluded he did seem fine and normally coherent. He should be able to hold an intelligent conversation. She looked over at him again as he gazed out the passenger-side window toward whatever it
was that had captivated his attention in the sparse but rich landscape.
“Have you had a chance to look into that thing I mentioned with your Marine brothers, using social media?” She put the question out there as an icebreaker.
Arthur just shook his head. “Not yet. I’ve had too many things on my mind.” He looked at her. “Especially now.”
Arthur returned his gaze out his window to a terrain that was like any other he had seen in his years growing up in this neck of the world. It actually didn’t differ that much from anything he had seen during his combat deployment with John Sykes. Sand is sand, he thought. Hard compacted or not. It still soaks up blood.
“Arthur?” Sharon said.
No response.
“Arthur?” she said again.
He turned his head.
“You okay, babe? You looked like you were a million miles away.”
Arthur sat up in his seat, took a deep breath, and let it out through his nostrils. “I was just thinking about John. We’d already had a couple of deployments and were in Iraq at the FOB one night—forward operating base—getting ready to go outside the T-wall again, and this kid who couldn’t have been any more than nineteen or twenty was bitching that he’d never had the chance to go out.” Arthur could see she was paying close attention while still watching the undulating highway that rolled out in front of her. She always could multitask. “He had a desk job or something and was just aching to see some action.”
Sharon said, “T-wall?”
“It’s a twelve-foot-high steel-reinforced concrete blast wall that separated us from the bad guys.”
Sharon nodded.
“John tells the kid that if he wants to take his slot, he should check and see if it would be allowed. If so, he’d swap with him. Hell, he and I had already been out every day that week.” Arthur paused to glance out his window again at the safe world as it passed leisurely by. He let his thumb and forefinger push up his sunglasses, pinch the bridge of this nose. “So the kid goes and gets the okay, and he and I go out the next day with our unit.” Arthur’s eyes closed. “Long story short, we get hit and the kid gets killed.”
Death Waits in the Dark Page 12
