Captain Largo’s instructions on the subject of cooperation with the FBI were clear and emphatic. “When you have to work with a Fed, use his car, not ours.”
That explained why Sergeant Jim Chee was sitting in the passenger side of a dark blue Ford sedan, with Special Agent Oz Osborne of the Federal Bureau of Investigation behind the wheel. The automobile, a type favored by the Bureau since as far back as memory went, had been parked all morning amid an infinity of sage brush on the slope above the Huerfano Trading Post. It was a pleasant location with a fine view of the business establishment below, of traffic speeding along New Mexico Highway 44, of Chaco Mesa far to the west, and the sacred Turquoise Mountain rising against the sky beyond that. North. Visible through the side window were the towering walls of Huerfano Mesa.
The view was why they were there, with the focus being on the trading post and the highway. Their orders were more detailed than Largo’s had been.
If an old pale blue Volkswagen camper van showed up below them—either emerging from Navajo Route 7500, which wandered through the Bisti Oil Field, or on U.S. 44, they would drive down to the highway, stop the van, and check the credit cards of everyone in it. If anyone had Visa card number 0087-4412-8703, made out to Carl Mankin, this person would be held. Osborne’s superior in Gallup would be immediately notified. The van occupants would be taken to Farmington and held for questioning. If no one had this credit card, all would be taken into the Huerfano Trading Post, and the employees there would be asked if any of them resembled the fellow who had stopped at the post in the blue van on two recent occasions buying gasoline with the Mankin card in the “pay at pump” computer, which didn’t ask for card-owner signatures.
If store employees didn’t identify anyone, Osborne would inform his boss, hold everyone, and await further instructions. Chee didn’t like that. In fact, there was a lot of this duty he didn’t like. For example, Agent Osborne’s tight-lipped attitude about it. Well, he’d try again.
“If you were a gambling man, Oz, about what would be the odds this guy shows up in his Volks?” Chee asked. “Or has that credit card, if he does show up?”
Osborne was listening to some sort of music on his tape player headset. He reduced the volume, shrugged, said: “Very slim. Highly unlikely.”
“Exactly,” Chee said. “So having us out here waiting for this bird with damn little chance of seeing him is another of those things that tells me this Carl Mankin was either very important himself, or had done something very important.”
Chee paused, glanced at Osborne. Osborne was listening, but pretending not to.
“I didn’t see that name on your most-wanted list.”
Osborne shrugged.
“If somebody stole my Discover Card, and I reported it missing—or if I disappeared myself, hiding out, and was using it here and there—would the federal government drop everything and start this dragnet? I doubt it.”
Osborne chuckled. “You think one of your girlfriends would miss you?” he said. “How about that pretty Officer Bernie Manuelito you’re always talking about. Would she come back to look for you?”
Which caused Chee to change the subject of his thoughts. He resumed his fruitless speculation about Bernie, about the real reasons she’d quit the Navajo Tribal Police to become a Border Patrol Officer, and about the letter from her in his jacket pocket, what it had said about the dangerous-sounding work she was doing, and, worse, its absolute lack of any hint of missing him. But Chee didn’t want to talk to Osborne about Bernie. He let the remark pass and went back to the question of Mankin.
“Or perhaps Mankin was in the act of doing something very important for some very big bureaucrat,” Chee said. “What do you think?”
“I don’t think,” Osborne said. “Remember? You told me federal employees aren’t allowed to do that.”
“Come on, Osborne,” Chee said. “Someone big in federal affairs believes this is important or we wouldn’t even know about the credit card. The purchases were recent. Somebody big had to call Mr. Visa himself and get a drop-everything computer check made on that Mankin number. Right?”
“They don’t tell me things like that.”
“And they still haven’t told you whether they’ve identified our well-dressed homicide victim? Right?”
Osborne nodded.
“Let me speculate then. Let’s say the officially unidentified body and the Visa card both belong to Carl Mankin. And Mankin was either a much-trusted and highly ranked agent of something like the National Security Agency, or the Central Intelligence Agency, Drug Enforcement, or our new Homeland Security Agency, or any of the other ten or twelve federal intelligence bureaucracies busy competing with one another, and now his bosses have missed him. And they want to know who killed him? Or, more important, why?”
Osborne looked at Chee, yawned, and resumed staring out the window.
“So we’re out here on the off chance that we will catch whoever got off with Mankin’s credit card, and he will tell us something useful.” Chee said. “Is that it?”
“I wonder who started that notion that Navajos were silent, taciturn people,” Osborne said. “My theory is the killer is the lead scout for a flying saucer invasion and he had to shoot Mankin because Mankin had uncovered their conspiracy to take over our planet? Or how about Carl Mankin is a favorite nephew of the president’s best friend? That sound all right?” He turned off his tape player, fished another tape out of the glove box, and looked at it. “How about James Taylor in Concert? He’s good.”
“Whatever,” Chee said. “You’re the one who listens to it. And you know what I’m going to do tomorrow, if we’re not still out here waiting for Volks? I’m going to a man I know who accepts Visa cards from his customers, give him this Mankin number, and get him to call Visa for a background check. Then I’ll tell you, and you can pass it along to the top brass in the Bureau.”
“I listen to the music to keep me from listening to you,” Osborne said. “You’d finally wear me down and I’d be leaking all of our secrets.”
So James Taylor’s voice floated in, barely audible through the wrong side of Osborne’s earphones, something about plans putting an end to someone catching Chee’s attention. The plans someone made had permanently put an end to a still-unidentified well-dressed middle-aged man who might, or might not, be Carl Mankin. But whose plans? And what plans? And how did this fellow fit into them. Apparently not well because he’d been shot and then dumped facedown into a shallow wash and buried so casually that the wind had blown the dirt away from one hand and the back of his head. A sad way to go into that next existence.
Osborne had removed his headphones to rub his ear just as James Taylor was remembering the lonely times when he could not find a friend. His sadness worsened Chee’s mood. When his time came, Chee knew, his kin would come, and his friends. One of the Mormons in his paternal clan would suggest an undertaker, one of the born-again Christians in his maternal clan would agree, and the traditionals would politely ignore this. The designated one would wash his body, dress him properly, put his ceremonial moccasins on his feet, properly reversed to confuse any witch who might be hunting dead skin for his corpse powder bundle. Then his body would be carried to some secret place where no skinwalker could find it, no coyotes or ravens could reach it, no anthropologist could come to steal his little vial of pollen and his prayer jish to be stored in their museum basement. Then the sacred wind within him would begin its four-day journey into the Great Adventure that awaits us all.
Chee sighed.
Osborne took off his headset. “That Taylor stuff’s too sad for you,” he said. “You want something more upbeat? How about—”