Dashee waved at him. “Rosie Rosner,” Dashee said. “Claims he has the easiest job in North America. Even easier than being a deputy. Three or four times a day an Environmental Protection Agency copter flies in here, he refuels it, and then nods off again until it comes back.”
“I think I saw that copter at the Farmington Airport,” Chee said. “Guy there said they’re locating abandoned uranium mines. Looking for radioactive dumps.”
“I asked the guy if he’d seen our bandidos driving in,” Dashee said. “But no such luck. They started doing this the next day.”
Dashee honked at the driver and waved. “Come to think of it, I guess the timing was pretty lucky for him.”
About a mile beyond the refueling truck Dashee stopped again and got out.
“Take a look at this.“ He pointed to a black outcrop of basalt beside the track, partly hidden by an outstretched limb of a four-wing salt bush and a collection of tumbleweeds.
“Here’s where they banged up their oil pan on the truck,” he said. “Either they didn’t know the road, or they weren’t paying attention or they swerved just a little bit to do it on purpose.”
“So we’d think they abandoned the truck because they didn’t have any choice,” Chee said.
“Maybe. You’d see they didn’t drive it much farther.”
After another few hundred yards Dashee turned off the packed earth of the unimproved road into an even vaguer track. He rolled the patrol car down a slope into a place where humps of blown sand supported a growth of Mormon tea and a few scraggly junipers.
“Here we are,” he said. “I’m parking just about exactly where they left the pickup.”
Chee climbed one of the mounds, looked down at the place the truck had been and all around.
“Could you see the truck from the track? Just driving past?”
“If you knew where to look,” Dashee said. “And Timms would have noticed the oil leak, and the tracks turning off. He would have been looking.”
“You find any tracks?”
“Sure,” Dashee said. “Both sides of the truck where they got out. Two sets. Then somebody told the feds, and here comes the copters full of the city boys in their bulletproof suits.”
“The copters blew away the tracks?”
Dashee nodded. “Just like they did it for us in the ‘98 business. When I called it in, I asked ’em to warn the feds about that.” Dashee laughed. “They said that’d be like trying to tell the pope how to hear confessions. Anyway, the light wasn’t too bad, and I took a roll of photographs. Boot prints and the places they put stuff they unloaded.”
“Like what?”
“Mark left by a rifle butt. Something that might have been a box. Big sack. So forth.“ Dashee shrugged.
Chee laughed. “Like a sack full of Ute Casino money, maybe. By the way, how much did they get?”
“An “undetermined amount,” according to the FBI. But the unofficial and approximate estimate I hear it was four hundred and eighty-six thousand, nine hundred and eleven dollars.”
Chee whistled.
“All unmarked money, of course,” Dashee added. “And lots of pockets full of big-value chips which honest folks grabbed off the roulette tables while escaping in the darkness.”
“Did the tracks head right off toward the Timms place? Or where?”
“We didn’t have much time to look. The sheriff called right back and said the FBI wanted us not to mess around the scene. Just back off and guard the place.”
“Not much time to look, huh?” Chee said. “What did you see when you did look? What was in the truck?”
“Nothing much. They’d stolen it off of one of those Mobil Oil pump jack sites, and it had some of those greasy wrenches, wipe rags, empty beer cans, hamburger wrappers, so forth. Stuff left under the seats and on the floorboards. Girlie magazine in a door side pocket, receipts for some gas purchases.“ Dashee shrugged. “About what you’d expect.”
“Anything in the truck bed?”
“We thought we had something there,” Dashee said. “A good-as-new-looking transistor radio there on the truck bed. Looked expensive, too.“ He shrugged. “But it was broken.”
“Broken. It wouldn’t play?”
“Not a sound,” Dashee said. “Maybe the battery was down. Maybe it broke when whoever threw it back there.”
“More likely they threw it back there because it was already broken,” Chee said. He was staring westward, down into the wash, and past it into the broken Utah border country, the labyrinth of canyons and mesa where the Navajo Tribal Police, and police from a score of other state, federal and county agencies had searched for the killers in the ’98 manhunt.
“You know, Cowboy,” Chee said, ”I’ve got a feeling we’re a little bit north of your jurisdiction here. I think Apache County and Arizona stopped a mile or two back there and we’re in Utah.”
“Who cares?” Dashee said. “What’s more interesting is you can’t see Timms place from here. It’s maybe a mile down the track.”
“Let’s go take a look,” Chee said.
It was, judging by the police car odometer, 1.3 miles. The road wandered down a slope into a sagebrush flat, to a pitched-roof stone house and a cluster of outbuildings. A plank barn with a red tar-paper roof dominated the scene. From a pole jutting above it a white wind sock dangled, awaiting a breeze to return it to duty. Chee noticed an east-west strip of the flat had been graded clear of brush. He also noticed that the road continued beyond this place, reduced to a set of parallel ruts and wandering across the flat to disappear over a ridge.
Chee pointed. “Where’s it go?”
“Another three, four miles, there’s another little ranch, the widow I told you about,” Dashee said. “It dead-ends there.”
“No outlet then? Back to the highway?”
“Unless you can fly,” Dashee said.
“I had been thinking that maybe the perps had turned off on this road figuring they’d circle past a roadblock on U.S. 191 up toward Bluff. I guess that would mean they didn’t know this country.”
“Yeah,” Dashee said, "I thought about that. The feds figured it means they knew the Timms airplane was there waiting for them.”
“Or they knew a trail down into Gothic Canyon, and down that to the San Juan, and down the river to some other canyon.”
“Oh, man,” Dashee said. “Don’t even think of that.“ And he pulled the car into Eldon Timms’s dusty yard.
A woman was standing on the shady side of the house watching them. Wearing jeans, well-worn boots, a man’s shirt with the sleeves rolled and a wide-brimmed straw hat. About middle seventies, Chee guessed. But maybe a little younger. Whites didn’t have the skin to deal with this dry sunshine. They wrinkled up about ten years early. She was walking toward the car as Chee and Dashee got out, squinting at them.
“That’s Eleanor Ashby,” Dashee said. “Widow living over the hill there. She looks after Timms’s livestock when he’s away. She said they trade off.”
“Sheriff,” Eleanor Ashby said, "what brings you back over here? You forget something?”
“We were looking for Mr Timms,” Dashee said, and introduced Chee and himself. “I forgot some things I wanted to ask him.”
“You needed to go to Blanding to do that,” she said. “He headed up there this morning to talk to the insurance people.”
“Well, it’s nothing important. Just some details I needed to fill in for the paperwork. I forgot to ask him what time of day it was he got back here and found his airplane was missing. But it can wait. I’ll catch him next time I get back up this way.”
“Maybe I can help you with that,” Eleanor said. “Let me think just for a minute, and I can get close to it. He was supposed to bring me some stuff from Blanding, and I thought I’d heard an airplane, so I came on over. Thinking he’d gotten home, but he wasn’t back yet.”
“About noon?” Chee asked. “You’re lucky you weren’t here when the bandits were.”