He sat across the table from Gershwin and sipped his coffee. “You sure you don’t want a cup?”
Gershwin shook his head.
“So then I went up and talked to people around Bluff and around there about those men. I learned a little about all of them, but more about Jorie,” Leaphorn said, watching Gershwin over the rim of his cup. “I decided I’d see if any of them were home. Jorie was.”
“Killed himself. That right? So you’re the one who found his body.”
Leaphorn nodded.
“Paper said he left a suicide note. Is that right?”
“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “There it was.“ He wondered how he would answer when Gershwin asked him what was in it. But Gershwin didn’t ask.
“I wonder why -" Gershwin began, but he cut off the sentence and started again. “The newspaper story sort of said the note was a confession. That he gave the names of the other two. That right?”
Leaphorn nodded.
“Then I don’t see why those militia bastards are putting the blame on me." The tone of that was angry, and so was his stare.
“That’s a puzzle,” Leaphorn said. “Do you think they suspect you know a lot about the robbery plan and were giving that away? Any chance of that?”
“I don’t see how that could be. When I was going to meetings, there was always somebody talking about doing something wild. Something to call attention to their little revolution. But nobody ever talked about robbery.”
Leaphorn let it drop. He took another sip of coffee, looked at Gershwin, waited.
Gershwin slammed his fist on the table. “Damn it to hell,” he said. “Why can’t the cops catch those bastards? They’re out there somewhere. They got their names. Know what they look like. Know where they live. Know their habits. It’s just like that ‘98 mess. You got FBI agents swarming around everywhere. You Navajo cops, and the Border Patrol, and four kinds of state cops, and county sheriffs, and twenty other kinds of cops standing around and manning roadblocks. Why in hell can’t they get the job done?”
“I don’t know,” Leaphorn said. “But there’s enough canyons out there to swallow up ten thousand cops.”
“I guess so. I guess I’m being unreasonable." He shook his head. “To be absolutely honest about it, I’m scared. I’ll admit it. That guy that came to the filling station at Bluff the other morning, he could just as easy have come to my house. I could be dead right now. Dead in my bed. Just waiting for somebody to come wandering by and find my body.”
Leaphorn tried to think of something reassuring to say. The best he could come up with was that he guessed the bandits would rather run than fight. It didn’t seem to console Gershwin.
“You got any idea if the cops are closing in on them? Have they figured out where they might be?”
Leaphorn shook his head.
“If I knew that, I could sleep a little better. Now I can’t sleep at all. I just sit in my chair with the lights off and my rifle on my lap." He gave Leaphorn a pleading look. “I’ll bet you know something. Long as you was a cop, knowing all the other cops the way you do, and the FBI, they must tell you something.”
“The last 1 heard is pretty much just common knowledge. That stolen truck was abandoned out there on the mesa south of the San Juan, and that’s where I understand they’re trying to pick up some tracks. South of Bluff and Montezuma Creek and over in the Aneth Oil -"
The buzz of his telephone interrupted him.
He picked it up off the table, said, “Leaphorn.”
“This is Jim Chee. We found that mine." Chee’s voice was loud with exuberance.
“Oh. Where?”
“You got your map there?”
“Just a minute.“ Leaphorn slid the map closer, picked up his pen. “OK.”
“The mouth is not more than thirty feet below the canyon rim. About a hundred, hundred and ten feet up from the canyon bottom on a fairly wide shelf. And above it, there’s the remains of what must have been a fairly large building. Most of the roof gone now, but a lot of the stone walls still standing. And the framework of what might have been some sort of a hoist sticking up.”
“Sounds like what you were hoping to find,” Leaphorn said.
“And the reason it fits the theory is you couldn’t see the mouth of the mine from the bottom. It’s maybe seventy feet up, and hidden by the shelf.”
“How’d you find it?”
Chee laughed. “The easy way. Hitched a ride in the EPA helicopter.”
Leaphorn still had the pen poised. “Where is it from the place they abandoned the truck?”
“About two miles north—maybe a little less than that.”
Leaphorn marked one of his small, precise X’s at the proper spot. He glanced at Gershwin.
“What’s all this about?” Gershwin asked.
Leaphorn made one of those ‘just a second’ gestures. “Have you notified the FBI?”
“I’m going to call Captain Largo right now,” Chee said. “Let him explain it to the federals.”
“That sounded interesting,” Gershwin said. “Did they find something useful?”
Leaphorn hesitated. “Maybe. Maybe not. They’ve been looking for an old, long-abandoned mine out there. One of a thousand places people might hide.”
“An old coal mine,” Gershwin said. “There’s lots of those around. You think it’s something I could count on? Sleep easy again?”
Leaphorn shrugged. “You mean, would I bet my life on it?”
“Yeah,” Gershwin said. “I guess that’s what I mean." He stood, picked up his hat, looked down at the map. “Well, to hell with it. I think I owe you an apology, Joe, storming in here like I did. I’m just going to head on home, pack up my stuff, and move out to a motel until this business is over with.”
Chapter Twenty-three
Sergeant Jim Chee limped into Largo’s cluttered office feeling even more uneasy than he usually did when approaching the captain. And rightfully so. When he’d pulled into the Navajo Tribal Police parking lot he’d noticed two of the shiny black Ford Taurus FBI sedans. Chee’s law-enforcement rela-tionship with the world’s largest police force had often been beset with friction. And Captain Largo’s telephone call summoning him to this meeting had been even more terse than usual.
“Chee,” Largo had said, "get your ass up here. Now!" Chee nodded to Special Agent Cabot and the other well-dressed fellow sitting across the desk from the captain and took the chair to which Largo motioned him. He put his cane across his lap and waited.
“You already know Agent Cabot,” Largo said. “And this gentleman is Special Agent Smythe." Mutual mumbles and nods followed.
“I’ve been trying to explain to them why you think this old mine you’ve found might be the place to look for Ironhand and Baker,” Largo said. “They tell me they’ve already checked every mine deeper than a dog hole up on that mesa. If you’ve found one they missed, they want to know where it is.”
Chee told them, estimating as closely as he could the distance of the mine’s canyon mouth from the San Juan and the distance of the surface structure in from the canyon rim.
“You spotted this from a helicopter?” Cabot asked. “Is that correct?”
“That’s correct,” Chee said.
“Did you know we have prohibited private aircraft flights in that area?” Cabot said.
“I presumed you had,” Chee said. “That was a good idea. Otherwise, you’ll have those bounty hunters your reward offer is bringing in tying up the air-lanes.”
This caused a very brief pause while Cabot decided how to respond to this—a not very oblique reminder of the gales of laughter the Bureau had produced in its 1998 fiasco by offering a $250,000 reward one day, and promptly following that with an exhortation for swarms of bounty hunters the offer had attracted to please go away. They hadn’t.