“So we put an X on our map and mark it ‘unreported,’” Chee said, “which doesn’t help much.”
“It might,” Officer Manuelito said. “Later on.”
Chee was extracting their map from his desk drawer. He kept it out of sight on the theory that everyone in the office except Manuelito would think this project was silly. Or, worse, they would think he was trying to copy Joe Leaphorn’s famous map.
Everybody in the Tribal Police seemed to know about that and the Legendary Lieutenant’s use of it to exercise his theory that everything fell into a pattern, every effect had its cause, and so forth.
The map was a U.S. Geological Survey quadrangle chart large enough in scale to show every arroyo, hogan, windmill, and culvert.
Chee pushed his in basket aside, rolled it out and penned a tiny blue ? on the Maryboy grazing lease with a tiny 3 beside it. Beside that he marked in the date the loss had been discovered.
Officer Manuelito looked at it and said: “A blue three?”
“Signifies unreported possible thefts,” Chee said. “Three of them.” He waved his hand around the map, indicating a scattering of such designations. “I’ve been adding them as we learn about them.”
“Good idea,” Manuelito said. “And add an X
there, too. Maryboy is going to be a lookout for us.” She pulled up a chair, sat, leaned her elbows on the desk, and studied the chart.
Chee added the X. The map now had maybe a score of those, each marking the home of a volunteer equipped with a notebook and ballpoint pen. Chee had bought the supplies with his own money, preferring that to trying to explain this system to Largo. If it worked, which today didn’t seem likely to Chee, he would decide whether to ask for a reimbursement of his twenty-seven-dollar outlay.
“Funny how this is already working out,” Manuelito said. “I thought it would take months.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the patterns you talked about,” she said. “How those single-animal thefts tend to fall around the middle of the month.” Chee looked. Indeed, most of the 1 s that marked single-theft sites were followed by mid-month dates. And a high percentage of those midmonth dates were clustered along the reservation border. But what did that signify? He said: “Yeah.” 49 of 102
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“I don’t think we should concentrate on those,” she said, still staring thoughtfully at the map. “But if you want me to, I could check with the bars and liquor stores around Farmington and try to work up a list of guys who come in about the middle of the month with a fresh supply of money.” She shook her head. “It wouldn’t prove anything, but it would give us a list of people to look out for.” About halfway through this monologue, Chee’s brain caught up with Manuelito’s thinking. The Navajo Nation relief checks arrived about the first of the month. Every reservation cop knew that the heavy workload produced by the need to arrest drunks tended to ease off in the second week when the liquor addicts had used up their cash. He visualized a dried-out drunk driving past a pasture and seeing a five-hundred-dollar cow staring through the fence at him. How could the man resist? And why hadn’t he thought of that?
He thought of it now. Weeks compiling the list, weeks spent cross-checking, sorting, coming up finally with four or five cases, getting maybe two convictions resulting in hundred-dollar fines, which would be suspended, and thirty-day sentences, which would be converted to probation. Meanwhile, serious crime would continue to flourish.
“I think instead we’ll sort those out and set them aside. Let’s concentrate on solving the multiple thefts,” Chee said.
“There’s a pattern there, too, I think,” Officer Manuelito said. “Am I right?” Chee had noticed this one himself. The multiple thefts tended to show up in empty country—from grazing leases like Maryboy’s where the owner might not see his herd for a month or so. They talked about that, which led them back to their growing list of rustler-watchers, which led them back to Lucy Sam.
“You looked through her telescope,” Manuelito said. “Did you notice she could see that place where the fence posts were loose?” Chee shook his head. He had been looking at the mountain. Thinking of the Fallen Man stranded on the cliff up there, calling for help.
“You could,” Manuelito said. “I looked.”
“I think I should go talk to her,” Chee said. But he wasn’t thinking of rustling when he said it. He was wondering what Lucy Sam’s father might have seen all those years ago when Hal Breedlove had huddled on that little shelf waiting to die.
17
THE SOUND OF BANG, BANG, BANG, thud, thud
stopped Joe Leaphorn in his tracks. It came from somewhere up Cache Creek, nearby, just around the bend and beyond a stream-side stand of aspens. But it stopped him just for a moment. He smiled, thinking he’d spent too many years as a cop with a pistol on his hip, and moved up the path. The aspen trunks were wearing their winter white now, their leaves forming a yellow blanket on the ground around them. And through the barren branches Leaphorn could see Eldon Demott, bending over something, back muscles straining.
Doing what? Leaphorn stopped again and watched. Demott was stretching barbed wire over what seemed to be a section of aspen trunk. And now, with more banging, stapling the wire to the wood.
Something to do with a fence, he guessed. Here a cable had been stretched between ponderosas on opposite sides of the stream, and the fence seemed to be suspended from that. Leaphorn shouted, “Hello!” It took Demott just a moment to recognize him but he did even before Leaphorn reminded him.
“Yeah,” Demott said. “I remember. But no uniform now. Are you still with the Tribal Police?”
“They put me out to pasture,” Leaphorn said. “I retired at the end of June.”
“Well, what brings you all this way up the Cache? It wouldn’t have something to do with finally finding Hal, would it? After all these years?”
“That’s a good guess,” Leaphorn said. “Breedlove’s family hired me to go over the whole business again. They want me to see if I overlooked anything. See if I could find out where he went when he left your sister at Canyon de Chelly. See if anything new turned up the past ten years or so.”
“That’s interesting,” Demott said. He retrieved his hammer. “Let me get done with this.” He secured the wire with two more staples, straightened his back, and stretched.
“I’m trying to rig up something to solve a problem here,” he explained. “The damned cows come to drink here, and then they move downstream a little ways—or their calves do—and they come out on the wrong side of the fence. We call it a water gap. Is that the term you use?”
“We don’t get enough water down in the low country where I was raised to need ’em much,” Leaphorn said.
“In the mountains, it’s the snowmelt. The creek gets up, washes the brush down, it catches on the fence and builds up until it makes a dam out of it, and the dam backs up the water until the pressure tears out the fence,” Demott said. “It’s the same story every spring.
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