“With the lines out, and all the scared gamblers scrambling around trying to get away from the casino, or trying to grab some chips, or whatever you do when the lights go out at the craps table. Anyway, it took a while before anybody knew what the hell was going on and got the word out.“ Largo eased back into his chair. “I think just about every track you can drive on was blocked by sunup, but by then they had a hell of a lead. Next thing, maybe nine-thirty or so, the word went out somebody in a pickup had shot at the Utah trooper. That shifted the focus westward. The next day a couple of deputy sheriffs found a banged-up pickup abandoned up by the Arizona-Utah border south of Bluff. It fit the description.”
“They find any tracks? Were they walking out, changing cars or what?”
“Two sets of tracks around the truck, but here came the feds in their 'copters"—Largo paused, waved his arms in imitation of a helicopter’s rotors—"and blew everything away.”
“Slow learners,” Chee said. “That’s the same way they fanned away the tracks we’d found across the San Juan in that big thing in ’98.”
“Maybe we ought to get the Federal Aviation Administration to order all those things grounded during manhunts,” Largo said.
"They have anything to match them with? Did they find any tracks at the casino?”
Largo shook his head, paused to sip his coffee, shrugged. “It looked like we were going to have an encore performance of that 1998 business. The federals got a command post set up. Everybody was getting into the act. Regular circus. All we needed was the performing elephants. Had plenty of clowns.”
Chee grinned.
“You’d have loved to come home to that.”
“I’d have gone right back to Alaska,” Chee said. “How’d the FBI find out about the airplane?”
“The owner called in to report it stolen. He said he’d been away up in Denver. When he got home he noticed somebody had broken into his barn, and the airplane he kept there was gone.”
“Close to where the pickup was abandoned?”
“Mile and a half or so,” Largo said. “Maybe two.”
Chee considered that. Largo watched him.
“You’re thinking they must have liked to walk.”
“Well, there’s that,” Chee said. “But maybe they wanted to hide the truck. Or if it was found, keep it far enough from the barn so there wouldn’t be a connection.”
“Uh-huh,” Largo said, and sipped coffee. “The FBI says the truck was disabled.”
“Out there, it’s easy enough to blow tires or bust an oil pan on the rocks if you want to,” Chee said.
Largo nodded. “I remember back at Tuba City you did that to a couple of our units, and you claimed you weren’t even trying.”
Chee let that pass. “Anyway,” he said, “I just hope that airplane had enough gas in it to get ‘em out of our jurisdiction.”
“Full tank, the owner said."
“Makes you think, doesn’t it?” Chee said. “I mean how neat everything worked out on both ends of this business.”
Largo nodded. “If this was my responsibility now, I’d be getting that rancher’s fingerprints and checking out his record and seeing if he was maybe tied up with survivalists, or the Earth Liberation Front, or the tree-huggers, or one of the militia.”
“I imagine the FBI is taking care of that. That’s the part they’re good at,” Chee said. “And how about the casino end? What do you hear about that?”
“They think the rent-a-cop was part of the team. Filled ’em in on when the money was sacked up for the Brinks pickup. Which wires to cut, which security people had the evening off. All that.”
“Any evidence?”
Largo shrugged. “Nothing much I know about. This Teddy Bai they’re holding in the hospital, he had a juvenile record. Witnesses said he was acting skittish all evening. Waiting around out in the lot when he was supposed to be in watching the drunks.”
“That’s not much,” Chee said.
“They probably have more than that,” Largo said. “You know how they are. The feds don’t tell us locals anything unless they have to. They think we might gossip about it and screw up the investigation.”
Chee laughed. “What! Us gossip?”
Largo was grinning, too.
“Have they connected Bai with any of the suspects?”
Largo laughed. “That cold air up in Alaska made an optimist out of you. Not a hint far as I hear. There was some guessing that one of the militia did it to get money for blowing something up, or maybe it was the Earth Liberation Front, but I haven’t heard Bai was in any of them. The Earth Liberation folks have been pretty quiet since they burned up all those buildings at the Vail ski resort. Anyway, if anything checked out, they haven’t gotten around to informing the Navajo Tribal Police.”
“What do you think, Captain? Has your own grapevine been sending any messages about Bai that you haven’t gotten around to telling the feds about?”
Largo studied Chee, his expression suggesting he didn’t like the tone of that, and he wasn’t sure he would answer it. But he did.
“If Deputy Sheriff Bai is on the wrong side of this one, I haven’t heard it,” he said.
Chapter Five
Officer Bernadette Manuelito was absolutely correct when she reminded Chee that he knew a lot of people around Shiprock. That had paid off. A chat with a senior San Juan County undersheriff, a drop-in talk with an old friend in the county clerk’s office at Aztec, a visit at the Farmington pool hall and another at the Oilmen’s Bar and Grill had provided him with a headful of information about the Ute Casino in general and Teddy Bai in particular.
The casino came off better than he’d expected. There was the usual and automatic assumption that organized crime must have a finger in it somehow, but no one could offer any support for that. Otherwise, the people most likely actually to know anything considered it well run. No one had any specific notion about who might have been the robbery’s inside man if Bai wasn’t. There was agreement that Bai had been a wild kid and mixed opinion on his character in later life, with the consensus in favor of salvation. He had married a girl in the Streams Come Together Clan, but that hadn’t lasted. One of the regulars at Oilmen’s said since the divorce, Bai came in now and then with a young woman. Who? Chee asked. He didn’t know her, but he described her as ‘cute as a bug’s ear.' It wasn’t the metaphor Chee would have chosen, but it could fit Officer Bernadette Manuelito.
It was also at Oilmen’s that he learned Bai had been taking flying lessons.
“Flying lessons?” Chee said. “Really? Where?”
Chee’s source for this was a New Mexico State Police dispatcher named Alice Deal. She delayed taking the intended bite from her cheeseburger to wave the free hand toward the Farmington Airport, which sat, like the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, on the mesa looking down on the city.
The sign over the office door of Four Corners Flight declared it the source of charter flights, aircraft rentals, repair, sales, parts, supplies and FAA-certified flight instruction. It didn’t appear to be busy in any of those categories when Chee walked into the front office. The only person on the premises was a woman in the manager’s office. She interrupted her telephone conversation long enough to wave Chee in.
“Well, now,” she was saying, "that’s no way to behave. If Betty acts like that, I just wouldn’t invite her anymore." She motioned Chee into a chair, listened a moment longer, said, "Well, maybe you’re right. I’ve got a customer. Got to go,” and hung up.
Chee introduced himself and his subject.
“Bai,” she said. “He owes us for a couple of lessons. The FBI already talked to us about him.”
“Could you -"
“Matter of fact, they wanted the names of everybody we’d been teaching for way back. Then they came back again to talk specifically about Teddy.”