Tap, tap, tap, followed by: "Jim. You home?”
The voice of the Legendary Lieutenant.
Chee rewrapped the sandwich, put it on the bedside table, sighed, limped over and opened the door.
Leaphorn stood there, looking apologetic, and beside him was the Woman Professor. She was smiling at him.
“Oops,” Chee said, stepping out of her line of vision and reaching for his pants. “Sorry. Let me get some clothes on.”
While he was doing that, Leaphorn was apologizing, saying they’d only be a minute. Chee waved them toward the room’s two chairs, and sat on the bed.
“You look exhausted,” the professor said. “The policewoman at your roadblock said you’d probably been searching in one of the canyons all day. But Joe learned something he felt you needed to know." She gave Chee a wry smile. “I told him you probably already knew it.”
“Better safe than sorry,” Chee said, and looked at Leaphorn, who was sitting uneasily on the edge of his chair.
“Just a couple of things about this George Ironhand,” Leaphorn said. “I guess you knew he was a Vietnam veteran, but we heard today he was a Green Beret. Heard he was a sniper, won a Silver Star. Supposed to have shot fifty-three North Viet soldiers over in Cambodia.”
Leaphorn stopped.
Chee thought about that for a moment.
“Fifty-three,” he said finally. “I appreciate your telling me. I think if the FBI had let us in on that little secret, Officer Nez would have kept his body armor on in the canyon.”
“I imagine the FBI would know this man was a veteran,” Leaphorn said. “They’re pretty thorough in checking records. But they might not know about the rest of it. To know that, they’d have to turn up the business about him getting decorated.”
“Or pass it along if they did,” Chee said, his voice now sounding more angry than tired. “We might leak it to the press; the feds wouldn’t want the public to know we’re chasing a certified official war hero.”
“Well,” Leaphorn said, "they probably didn’t pick up the sniper bit. Army records would just show he received the decoration for something general. Risking his life beyond the call of duty. Something like that.”
“OK,” Chee said. “I guess I wasn’t being fair.”
“At least, though,” said the professor, "I’d think they should have told you he was a combat veteran.”
“Me, too,” Chee said. “But I guess nobody’s perfect. I know we weren’t today. All we got was a lot of exercise.”
“No tracks?”
Chee waved his hands.
“Lots of tracks. Coyotes, goats, rabbits, lizards, snakes, variety of birds every place there was a seep,” Chee said. “But no sign of humans. We even picked up what might have been puma tracks. Either that or an oversize big-footed bobcat. One sign of porcupine, rodents galore, from kangaroo rats, to deer mice, to prairie dogs.”
“Could you rule out humans?”
“Not really,” Chee said. “Too much slick rock. We didn’t find a single place in maybe five miles we covered where anybody careful couldn’t find rocks to walk on.”
“So the hunt goes nowhere,” Leaphorn said. “I guess until someone comes up with a better reason for leaving that escape vehicle where it was left.”
“You mean better than running down into Gothic Creek to hide?” Chee laughed. “Well, I guess that was better than the first idea. Thinking they trotted over to the Timms place to fly away in that old airplane of his." Chee paused. “Wait a minute. You said you had two things to tell me, Lieutenant. What’s the second one. Do you have a better idea?”
Leaphorn looked a bit embarrassed, shook his head.
“Not really,” he said. “Just more stuff about George Ironhand. Maybe it might mean something." He glanced at Louisa. “Where do I start?”
“At the beginning,” Louisa said. “First tell him about the original Ironhand.”
So he recounted the deeds of the legendary Ute hero/bandit, the futile efforts of the Navajos to hunt him down, describing Bashe Lady’s account of how those hunting him thought he might be a witch because he seemed able to disappear from a canyon bottom and reappear magically on its rim.
“She said the Navajos thought he escaped like a bird, but actually he escaped like a badger." Leaphorn paused with that, watching for Chee’s reaction.
Chee was rubbing his chin, thinking.
“Like a badger,” Chee said. “Or a prairie dog. In one hole and out another. Did she give you any hint of where this was happening? Name a canyon, anything like that?”
“None,” Leaphorn said.
“Do you think she knows?”
“Probably. At very least, I think she has a pretty good general idea. She knew a lot more than she was willing to tell us about that.”
Professor Bourebonette was smiling. “She didn’t show any signs of affection for you Navajos. You 'Bloody Knives.' I think that after about four hours of that, she was getting under Joe’s skin a little. Right, Joe? Arousing your competitive, nationalistic macho instincts, maybe?”
Leaphorn produced a reluctant chuckle. “OK,” he said. “I plead guilty. I was imagining Bashe Lady in one of those John-Wayne-type movies. Tepees everywhere, paint ponies standing around, dogs, cooking fires, young guys with Italian faces and Cheyenne war paint running around yipping and thumping drums, and there’s Bashe Lady with a bloody knife in her hand torturing some tied-up prisoners. And I’m thinking of how it actually was in 1863, when these Utes teamed up with the U.S. Army, and the Hispanos and the Pueblo tribes and came howling down on us and -"
Professor Bourebonette held up her hand.
Leaphorn cut that off, made a wry face and a dismissing gesture. “Sorry,” he said. “The old lady got on my nerves. And I’ll have to admit I’d love to see the Navajo Tribal Police catch this new version of Ironhand and lock him up.”
“The point of all this is that the George Ironhand you’re looking for is probably the son of the original version,” Professor Bourebonette said. “The first one took a new wife when he was old. The right time span for this guy. Right age to be in the Vietnam War.”
Chee nodded. “So the man we’re looking for would likely know how his daddy did the badger escape trick. And where he did it.” He looked at Leaphorn. “Do you have any ideas about that?”
“Well, I was going to ask you if you had found any mine shafts down in Gothic Creek Canyon.”
“We saw several little coal digs. What they call dog holes. None of them went in more than a few yards. Just people digging out a few sacks to get them through the winter. That creek cuts through coal seams in a lot of places, some of them pretty thick. But we didn’t see anything that looked like commercial mining.”
“Maybe Ironhand has himself a hidden route up some narrow side gulch,” Leaphorn said. “From the way the old woman told the story there just had to be a quick way to get up and down the canyon wall. Did you see any little narrow cuts like that? Maybe even a crack a man could climb?”
“Not in the section we covered,” Chee said. “Maybe we’ll find one farther down toward the San Juan Canyon.”
“If they had a secret hidey-hole, I think you’d find it not too far from where they left the truck. They’d be carrying a lot. Food and water probably, unless they stocked up in advance. And four hundred and something thousand dollars. From that casino it would be mostly in small bills. That would be a lot of weight. And then weapons. They apparently used assault rifles at the casino. They’re heavy.”
That triggered another thought in Chee—a worry that had been nagging for attention.
“You mentioned a roadblock on your way in from the Ute Reservation. An NTP block, I think you said. Talking to a policewoman.”
“It was one of our patrol cars, but the man sitting in it was wearing a San Juan County deputy uniform. The woman was wearing a Navajo Police uniform. Up here it would probably be one of your people out of Shiprock.”