“Several ranchers around here have their little planes,” Potts said. “None of those guys, though. I remember hearing Jorie going on about flying for the navy on his talk show, but I know he didn’t have a plane. And airplanes was one of the things Jorie used to bitch about. People flying over his ranch. Said they scared his livestock. He thought it was people spying on him when he was stealing pots. Baker and Ironhand now. Far as I know, neither of them ever had anything better than a used pickup.”
“You know where Jorie lives?” Leaphorn asked.
Potts stared at him. “You going to go see him? What you going to say? Did you rob the casino? Shoot the cops?”
“If he did, he won’t be home. Remember? He flew away.”
“Oh, right,” Potts said, and laughed. “If the Federal Bureau of Ineptitude says it, it must be true." He pushed himself up. “Let me get myself a piece of paper and my pencil. I’ll draw you a little map.”
Chapter Eight
Cowboy Dashee rolled down the window of Apache County Sheriff’s Department Patrol Unit 4 as Chee walked up. He leaned out, staring at Chee.
“The cooler’s in the trunk,” Dashee said. “Dry ice in it, with room enough for about forty pounds of smoked Alaska salmon caught by my Navajo friend. But where’s the damned fish?”
“I hate to tell you about that,” Chee said. “The girls had this big welcome-home salmonfest for me at Shiprock. Dancing around the campfire down by the San Juan, swimming bareback in the river. Just me and nine of those pretty teachers from the community college." Chee opened the passenger-side door and slid in. “I should have remembered to invite you.”
“You should have,” Dashee said. “Since you’re going to work me for some favor. From what you said on the telephone, you’re going to try to get me in trouble with the FBI. What do you want me to do?”
They’d met at the Lukachukai Chapter House, Chee making the long drive from Farmington over the Chuska Mountains and Dashee up from his station at Chinle. Dashee arrived a little late. And now was accused by Chee of being corrupted from his stern Hopi ways and learning how to operate on ‘Navajo Time,' which recognized neither late nor early. They wasted a few minutes exchanging barbs and grinning at one another as old friends do, before Chee answered Dashee’s question.
“What I’d like you to do is help me get straightened out on that business with the stolen airplane,” Chee said.
“Eldon Timms’s airplane? What’s to straighten out? The bandidos stole it and flew away. And thank God for that." Dashee made a wry face. “If you see it anywhere, just call the nearest office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
“You think that’s what actually happened?”
Dashee laughed. “Let’s just say I hope the feds got it right this time. Otherwise, we both ought to apply for a leave. I don’t think I could stand a repeat of that Great Four Corners Manhunt of 1998. You want to go crashing around in the canyons again?”
“I could get along without that,” Chee said, and told Dashee what he’d learned about the Timms
L-17, and the insurance, and Timms’s futile effort to sell it, and all the rest. “You mind us driving over there and showing me where the pickup was found, and the barn where Timms kept the plane? Just going over that part of it with me?”
Dashee studied him. “You’re wanting to use your old buddy Cowboy because you’re not back on duty yet, and don’t have any business out there anyway even if you were. And me, being a deputy sheriff of Apache County, Arizona, could claim I had some legitimate reason to be butting in on a case the FBI has taken over. So if the feds get huffy about us nosy locals, they can blame me. Am I right?”
“That’s about it,” Chee said. “Does it make sense to you?”
Dashee snorted, started the engine. “Well, then, let’s go. Let’s get there while we still have a little daylight.”
The sun was low when Dashee stopped the patrol car. The ragged top of Comb Ridge to the west was producing a zigzag pattern of light and shadow across the sagebrush flats of the Nokaito Bench. The Gothic Creek bottoms below were already a crooked streak of darkness. Dashee was pointing down into the canyon. “Down there but for the grace of God and Timms’s convenient airplane go you and I,” he said. “Once again testing the federal law-enforcement theory that to locate fugitives you send out local cops until the perps start shooting them, thereby giving away their location.”
“It used to work in India when the nabobs were hunting tigers,” Cree said. “Only they did it with beaters instead of deputy sheriffs. They’d send those guys in to provoke the animals.”
“I thought they used goats.”
“That was later,” Chee said. “After the beaters joined the union. Now why not tell me why we’re stopping here.”
“High ground. You can see the lay of the land from here.“ Dashee pointed northeast. “Up there, maybe three miles, is the Timms place. You can’t see it because it’s beyond that ridge, down a slope." He pointed again. “This road we’re on angles along the rim of the mesa over Gothic Creek, then swings back past the Timms place, and then sort of peters out at a widow woman’s ranch up toward the San Juan. That’s the end of it. The truck was abandoned about a mile and a half up ahead.”
Chee hoisted himself onto the front fender. “All I know about this case is what I’ve heard since I got home. Fill me in. What’s the official Theory of the Crime?”
Dashee grinned. “You think the feds would tell an Apache County deputy?”
“No. But somebody in the Denver FBI, or maybe the Salt Lake office, or Phoenix, or Albuquerque, fills in some state-level cop, and he tells somebody else, and the word spreads and pretty soon somebody else tells your sheriff, and —" Chee made an all-encompassing gesture. “So everybody knows in about three hours, and the federals maintain their deniability.”
“OK,” Dashee said. “What we hear goes like this. This Teddy Bai fella, the one the FBI is holding at the Farmington hospital, he tells some of the wrong people how easy it would be to rob the Ute Casino, and the word gets back to some medium-level hoods. Maybe Las Vegas hoods, maybe Los Angeles. I’ve heard it both ways, and it’s just guesswork. Anyway, the theory is Bai gets contacted. He’s offered a slice if he’ll help with the details, like getting the timing just right, all the inside stuff they need to know. Who’s on guard when. When the bank truck comes. How to cut off the power, telephones, so forth. Bai is a flier, he tells them that Timms has this old army short-takeoff recon airplane they can grab for the getaway. He’ll fly it for them. But they know that Bai’s local. He’ll be missed. He’ll be the way the hoods planning this can be traced. So they bring along their own pilot, shoot Bai, drive out to the Timms place, tear up the pickup truck so the cops will think they had to abandon it out here, steal the plane and"—(Dashee flapped his arms)—"away they go.”
Chee nodded.
“You’re thinking about Timms,” Dashee said. “The theory is they planned to kill him, too. That would have given them more time. But he wasn’t home. On his way home Timms heard about the robbery on the news and then found the lock on his barn busted, and his airplane gone, and he notified the cops. And since we’re closest, we got sent to check it out.”
Chee nodded again.
“You don’t like that, either?”
“I’m just thinking,” Chee said. “Show me where they left the truck.”
Doing that took them into the rugged, stony treeless territory where no one except surveyors seems to know exactly where Arizona ends and Utah begins. It involved a descent on a bad dirt road from the mesa top and took them past a flat expanse of drought-dwarfed sage where a white tanker truck was parked with its door open and a man sitting in the front seat reading something.