"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 terrain, 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.