Leaphorn acknowledged this with the barest hint of a nod.
“The second idea goes back to what you learned about Ironhand. He knew where his daddy hid during his career. How he managed his magical, mystical escapes. So I say that hiding place is around there someplace. The perps stocked it with food and water. And that’s where they intend to hide until it’s safe to make a run for it. That’s why they drove the truck over the rock—ripped out the oil pan to make it appear to the FBI that they were forced to abandon it there. Then they hiked away to their hidey-hole.”
Leaphorn’s nod acknowledging this was a bit less languorous.
“But they didn’t tell Jorie anything about this. It was their secret. Which means the double cross was planned far in advance of the crime.”
“Sure,” Chee said.
“I’m thinking of that second choice to look for them Jorie gave the police. That’s way up toward Blanding. A long, long way from where they abandoned the pickup.”
Chee sighed. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Cowboy had found three sets of tracks at that damned truck.”
Leaphorn laughed. “But let’s set that aside for now and get back to your second idea. We’ll say Baker and Ironhand had a place arranged to hide out. Jorie had parted company with them somehow before they got there. So Baker and Ironhand leave the truck and start walking. It wouldn’t be a long walk because, if we can believe what Jorie said in that note, they must have been carrying a heavy load of paper money. Presuming they hadn’t left it somewhere else, and why would they?”
“Heavy? I don’t think of paper money as being heavy.”
“I was guessing the Ute Casino wouldn’t be using many hundred-dollar bills. I guessed a ten-dollar average, and came up with forty-five thousand pieces of paper.”
“Be damned,” Chee said. “That’s a new factor to be thinking about.”
“I’m remembering the old Ute lady said the Utes sometimes called the original Ironhand Badger. She said he’d disappear from the canyon bottom and reappear at the top. Or the other way around. Remember that? She said our people chasing him thought he could fly.”
“Yes,” Chee said. But he was thinking about a huge problem with the second idea. With both of them, in fact. Jorie. Given what he said in the suicide note about where to find his partners, he must have slipped away from them long before they abandoned the truck. The distances were simply too great. Especially if they were humping almost a hundred pounds of money as well as their weapons. But how could he have slipped away? Probably possible. But then, why would he believe his partners would be going home? Wouldn’t he know they’d expect him to betray them?
Leaphorn was pursuing his own line of speculation. “Thinking of badgers got me to thinking of holes in the ground,” he said. “Of old coal mines. This part of the world has far more than its share of those. Coal almost everywhere. And then when the uranium boom started in the forties, the geologists remembered how the coal veins were usually mixed with uranium deposits, and they were digging away again.”
“Yeah,” Chee said. “We noticed three or four old digs when we were looking for tracks down in the Gothic Creek Canyon.”
Leaphorn looked very interested in that. “How deep? Real tunnels, or just places where people were taking a few wagonloads?”
“Nothing serious,” Chee said. “Just a place where somebody got a sackful to heat the hogan.”
“When the Mormon settlers moved in the middle of the nineteenth century they found the Navajos were already digging a little coal out of exposed seams. So were the Utes. But the Mormons needed a lot more to fire up smelters, so they developed some tunnel mines. Then the Aneth field development came, and there was natural gas to burn. The mines weren’t economical any longer. Some of them were filled in, and some of them collapsed. But there must be some around there in one form or another.”
“You’re thinking they’re hiding in a mine. I don’t know. Where I grew up near Rough Rock people dug a little coal, but it was all just shallow stuff. We called them dog-hole mines. Nothing anyone could hide in.”
“That’s over in the Chuska Mountains,” Leap-horn said. “Volcanic geology. Over by Gothic Creek Canyon it’s mostly formed by sedimentation. Stratum after stratum.”
"True.”
“An old-timer in Mexican Water — old fella named Mortimer I think it was—told me there used to be a slide cut down the cliff on the south side of the San Juan across from Bluff. From the rimrock all the way down. He said his folks would dig the coal out of seams in the canyon, hoist it to the top, load it into oxcarts and then dump it down the slide into carts down by the river. Then they’d ferry it across on a cable ferry.”
Chee was feeling a little less skeptical. “When was that?”
“It was about forty years ago when he told me, I’d guess, but he was talking about his parents when he was a child. I guess it was operating in the 1880s, or thereabouts. I’d like to take a look at that old mine if it still exists.”
“You think we could still find it? Maybe locate the wagon tracks and trace them back? Trouble is, wagon tracks tend to get wiped out in a hundred years.”
“I think we might find it another way,” Leaphorn said. “Did you ever take a look at those notices posted on chapter-house bulletin boards? The Environmental Protection Agency put them up. They have maps on them showing where the EPA is going to be flying its copters back and forth making surveys of old mine sites.”
“I’ve seen them,” Chee said. “But they’re surveying to map old uranium-mine sites. Trying to locate radioactive dumps.”
“Basically, yes. But what the monitors show is spots with high radiation levels. Coal seams out here are often associated with uranium deposits, and the one Mortimer told me about must have been a pretty big operation. I don’t have any business in this, but if I did, I’d call the EPA down in Flagstaff and see if they have a mine-waste map for that part of the Reservation.”
“I guess I could do that,” Chee said, sounding doubtful about it.
“Here’s the reason I’d be hopeful,” Leaphorn said. “Coal seams out here vary a lot in depth. Some right on the surface, some hundreds of feet down, and all depths between. You couldn’t haul it down the canyon bottom to the river. Too rough. Too many barriers. I’m thinking the Mormons must have got tired of hauling it up to the top after digging it, and dug down to the seam from the top of the mesa. They hoisted it to the top with some sort of elevator like they still do in most tunnel mines.”
“Which would explain how our Ironhand could fly from bottom to top,” Chee said. “How our Badger could have two holes.”
He picked up the telephone, dialed information, and asked for the Environment Protection Agency number in Flagstaff.
Chapter Twenty
On the fourth call and after the sixth or seventh explanation of what he wanted to various people in various DOE and EPA offices in Las Vegas, Nevada, and Flagstaff, Arizona, Sergeant Jim Chee found himself referred to a New Mexico telephone number and enlightened.
“Call this number in Farmington,” the helpful person in Albuquerque said. “That’s the project’s fixed base. Ask for either the fixed base operator or the project manager." That number took him right back to the Farmington Airport, no more than thirty miles or so from his aching ankle.
“Bob Smith here,” the answering voice said.
Chee identified himself, rattled off what he was after. “Are you the project manager?”
“I’m a combination technical guy on the helicopter and driver of the refueling truck,” Smith said.
"And I’m the wrong guy to talk to for what you want. I’ll try to get you switched to P.J. Collins.”
“What’s his title?”
“It’s her,” Smith said. “I think you’d call her the chief scientist on this job. Hold on. I’ll get her.”