He reached over, punched the button, awake enough now to be glad he’d been smart enough to erase the call from Cowboy Dashee. The machine reproduced the grouchy voice of Captain Largo saying: ‘This is Captain Largo. Get your ass down here. The feds located that damned airplane, and we’re going to be the beagles on one of their fox hunts again.'
The machine showed two other calls waiting and Chee clicked it off before they, whatever they were, got him into any trouble.
“I should have listened to that,” he said. “But I just got in about nine this morning, and I was worn-out." He told Largo how he and Officer Manuelito had brought his mother’s oldest brother home from the hospital, about how the old man had managed to hold death at bay until he saw sunlight on the mountaintop, how Bernadette had gone to bring Blue Woman’s sisters to help prepare the body for the traditional funeral. Under his uniform Largo was a traditional, a Standing Rock Dine’. He recalled the old man’s fame as a singer and his wisdom and, like Chee himself, avoided speaking the name of the dead. He offered Chee his condolences, sat on the edge of Chee’s fold-down cot, shook his head.
“I’d give you some time off if I could,” he said, ignoring the fact that Chee was officially still on vacation, "but you know how it is. We’ve got everybody out looking for those bastards, so I’m just going to give you a minute to get your uniform on, and while you do that I’ll fill you in, and then I want you out there getting things a little better organized.”
“OK,” Chee said.
A sudden and unpleasant thought struck the captain. “Manuelito was with you, then,” Largo said, looking murderous. “She didn’t bother to tell me, though. Did she bother to tell you I was looking all over for you?”
“I didn’t ask her,” Chee said, and busied himself getting his pants on, buttoning his shirt, hoping Largo wouldn’t notice how he’d evaded the question, thinking of nothing to say to take the heat off Bernie, and now, happy to see the captain heading out the door.
“I’ll bring you up to speed in my office,” Largo said. “In exactly thirty minutes.”
Approximately thirty minutes later Chee was sitting in the chair in front of Largo’s desk, listening to the captain’s end of a telephone conversation. “OK,” the captain said. “Sure. I understand. Will do. OK.” He hung up, sighed, looked at Chee and his watch. “All right,” he said. “Here’s the situation.”
Largo was good at it. He named and described the surviving suspects. Nobody was at home at either man’s residence. None of the neighbors had seen either man since before the robbery, which meant absolutely nothing in Ironhand’s case because the nearest neighbor lived about four miles away. A horse trailer and two horses seemed to be missing from Ironhand’s place. Since nobody could guess when or why, that might be equally meaningless. With their airplane-escape theory shot down, the feds had resumed custody of the manhunt operation, roadblocks were up, and trackers were working over the area around the spot where the suspects had abandoned the escape vehicle.
“Pretty much Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey again,” Largo said. “Three sets of state police involved, three sheriff’s departments, probably four, BIA cops, Ute cops, cops over from the Jicarilla Reservation, Immigration and Naturalization is sending up its Border Patrol trackers, federals galore, even Park Service security people. I’m putting you in Montezuma Creek. We have four people up there working with the FBI trying to locate some tracks. You’re reporting to Special Agent"—Largo consulted a notepad on his desk—"named Damon Cabot. I don’t know him.”
“I’ve heard of him,” Chee said. “You remember that old poem: 'The Lodges spoke only to Cabots, and the Cabots spoke only to God.'”
“No, I don’t,” Largo said, "and I hope you’re not going up there with that smart-aleck attitude.”
Chee looked at his watch. “You want me up there today?”
“I wanted you up there yesterday,” Largo said. “Be careful and keep in touch.”
“OK,” Chee said, and headed for the door.
“And Chee,” Largo said. “Use your head for once. Don’t get crosswise with the Bureau again. Have some manners. Give ’em some respect.”
Chee nodded.
Largo was grinning at him. “If you have trouble giving ‘em respect, just remember they get paid about three times more than you do.”
“Yeah,” Chee said. "That’ll help.”
The gathering place for the manhunt was the conference room of the Montezuma Creek Chapter House. The parking lot was crowded with a varied assortment of police cars, most easily identified by jurisdiction by Chee. He spotted Cowboy Dashee’s Apache County patrol unit resting off the gravel but under the shade of the lot’s solitary tree, a couple NTP units, two of the shiny black Ford sedans the FBI used and an equally shiny green Land Rover. That, he concluded, would be far too expensive to be owned by any of the nonfederal agencies here. Probably it had been seized in a drug raid and driven down from Salt Lake or Denver by whichever Special Agent had been put in charge of this affair.
The conference room itself was as crowded as the lot and almost as hot. Someone had concluded that the feeble window-mounted air-conditioning unit wasn’t handling the body heat produced by the crowd and had opened windows. A dozen or so men, some in camouflage outfits, some in uniforms, some in suits, were crowded around a table. Chee saw Dashee perched on a folding chair beside one of them, reading something.
Chee walked over. “Hey there, fella,” he said to Dashee. “Are you the Special Agent in Charge?”
“Keep your voice down,” Cowboy said. “I don’t want the feds to know I associate with you. Not until this business is over, anyway. However, the man you want to report to is that tall guy with the black baseball cap with FBI on it. That doesn’t stand for Full Blood Indian.”
“He looks sort of young. Do you think he understands this country?”
Dashee laughed. “Well, he asked me about the trout fishing in the San Juan. He said somebody told him it was great. I think he’s based in St Louis.”
“You tell him fishing was good?”
“Come on, Chee. Ease up. I just told him it was great about two hundred miles upstream before all the muddy irrigation water gets dumped in. He seems like a good guy. Said he was new out here. Didn’t know whether to call a gully an arroyo, or a wash, or a cut, or a creek. His name’s Damon Cabot.”
Up close Damon Cabot looked even younger than he had from the back of the room. He shook hands with Chee, explained that other detachments were handling other aspects of the hunt and that this group was trying to collect all possible evidence from the area where the escape vehicle had been abandoned.
“Here’s where we have you,” he said, pointing to the map spread on the table and indicating a red X near the center of Casa Del Eco Mesa. “That’s our Truck Base. Where the perps abandoned the pickup truck. Are you familiar with that area?”
“Just generally,” Chee said. “I worked mostly out of Shiprock and in the Tuba City district. That’s way west of here.”
“Well, you know it a hell of a lot better than I do,” Cabot said. “I just got reassigned from Philadelphia to Salt Lake City about a week ago. Did you work in that 1998 manhunt?”
Chee nodded.
“From what I’ve been overhearing, the Bureau didn’t add any luster to its reputation with that one.”
Chee shrugged. “Nobody did.”
“What do you think? Are those two guys still out there?”
“From 1998? Who knows? But a lot of people around here think so,” Chee said.
“I guess the Bureau decided they’re dead,” Cabot said. “I just wondered -" He cut that off, and shifted into telling Chee how the fugitives were thought to be armed: assault rifles and perhaps at least one scoped hunting rifle. Chee noticed that Special Agent Cabot seemed slightly downcast. The man had been trying to be friendly. The realization surprised Chee. It made him a bit ashamed of himself.