"You do this on trust," the passenger said. "Jesus. Jesus." It was a prayer.
They were below the level of the wash banks now, the lights rushing toward them. The wheels touched with a jounce and a squeal as Pauling touched the brakes. Perfect, he thought. You have to learn to trust. And in the very split second that he had the thought, he saw that trust was a terrible mistake.
Chapter Three
At first jim chee ignored the sound of the plane. Something had moved beyond Windmill Number 6. Moved, and moved again, making a small furtive sound which carried much farther than it should have in the predawn stillness. A half hour earlier he'd heard a car purring up the sandy bottom of Wepo Wash, stopping perhaps a mile downstream. This new sound suggested that whoever had driven it might now be approaching the windmill. Chee felt the excitement of the hunt rising in him. His mind rejected the intrusive hum of the aircraft engine. But the engine sound became impossible to ignore. The plane was low, barely a hundred feet off the ground, and moving on a path that would take it just west of the nest Chee had made for himself in a growth of stunted mesquite. It passed between Chee and the windmill, flying without navigation lights but so close that Chee could see reflections from the illumination inside the cabin. He memorized its shape—the high wing, the tall, straight rudder; the nose sloping down from the cabin windshield. The only reason he could think of for such a flight at such an hour would be smuggling. Narcotics probably. What else? The plane purred away toward Wepo Wash and the sinking moon, quickly vanishing in the night.
Chee turned his eyes, and his thoughts, back toward the windmill. The plane was none of his business. Navajo Tribal Policemen had absolutely no jurisdiction in a smuggling case, or in a narcotics case, or in anything involving the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency or the white man's war against white man's crime. His business was the vandalism of Windmill Subunit 6, the steel frame of which loomed awkward and ugly against the stars about one hundred yards west of him and which, on the rare occasions when the breeze picked up on this still summer night, made metallic creaking sounds as its blades moved. The windmill was only about a year old, having been installed by the Office of Hopi Partitioned Land to provide water for Hopi families being resettled along Wepo Wash to replace evicted Navajo families. Two months after it was erected, someone had removed the bolts that secured it to its concrete footings and used a long rope and at least two horses to pull it over. Repairs took two months, and three days after they were completed—with the bolts now securely welded into place—it had been vandalized again. This time, a jack handle had been jammed down into the gearbox during a heavy breeze. This had provoked a complaint from the Office of Hopi Partitioned Land to the Joint Use Administration Office at Keams Canyon, which produced a telephone call to the fbi office at Flagstaff, which called the Bureau of Indian Affairs Law and Order Division, which called the Navajo Tribal Police Headquarters at Window Rock, which sent a letter to the Tuba City subagency office of the Navajo Tribal Police. The letter resulted in a memo, which landed on the desk of Jim Chee. The memo said: "See Largo."
Captain Largo had been behind his desk, sorting through a manila folder.
"Let's see now," Largo had said. "Where do you stand on identifying that John Doe body up on Black Mesa?"
"We don't have anything new," Chee had said. And that, as Chee knew Captain Largo already knew, meant they had absolutely nothing at all.
"I mean the fellow somebody shot in the head, the one with no billfold, no identification," Largo said, exactly as if the Tuba City subagency was dealing in wholesale numbers of unidentified victims, and not this single exasperating one.
"No progress," Chee said. "He doesn't match anyone reported missing. His clothing told us exactly zero. Nothing to go on. Nothing."
"Ah," Largo said. He shuffled through the folder again. "How about the burglary at the Burnt Water Trading Post? You doing any good on that one?"
"No, sir," Chee said. He kept the irritation out of his voice.
"The employee stole the pawn jewelry, but we can't get a trace on him? Is that the way it stands?"
"Yes, sir," Chee said.
"Musket, wasn't it?" Largo asked. "Joseph Musket. On parole from the New Mexico State Penitentiary at Santa Fe. Right? But the silver hasn't turned up sold anywhere. And nobody's seen anything of Musket?" Largo was eyeing him curiously. "That's right, isn't it? You staying on top of that one?"
"I am," Chee had said. That had been midsummer, maybe six weeks after Chee's transfer from the Crownpoint subagency, and he didn't know how to read Captain Largo. Now summer was ending and he still didn't know.
"That's a funny one," Largo had said. He had frowned. "What the hell did he do with all the pawn goods? Why doesn't he try to sell it? And where'd he go? You think he's dead?"
The same questions had been nagging Chee ever since he'd gotten the case. He didn't have any answers.
Largo noticed that. He sighed; peered back into the folder. "How about bootlegging?" he asked without looking up. "Any luck nailing Priscilla Bisti?"
"Just one near miss," Chee said. "But she and her boys got all the wine out of the pickup before we got there. No way to prove it was theirs."
Largo was looking at him, lips pursed. Largo's hands were folded across his ample stomach. The thumbs waved up and down, patiently. "You going to have to be smart to catch old Priscilla." Largo nodded, agreeing with himself. "Smart," he repeated.
Chee said nothing.
"How about all that witchcraft gossip out around Black Mesa?" Largo asked. "Doing any good with that?"
"Nothing I can pin down," Chee said. "Seems to be more of it than's natural, and maybe it's because so many people are going to be uprooted and moved out to make room for the Hopis. Trouble is I'm still too new around here for anybody to be telling me anything about witches." He wanted to remind Largo of that. It wasn't fair of the captain to expect him, still a stranger, to learn anything about witches. The clans of the northwestern reservation didn't know him yet. As far as they knew, he might be a skinwalker himself.
Largo didn't comment on the explanation. He fished out another manila folder. "Maybe you'll have some luck on this one," he said. "Somebody doesn't like a windmill." He slipped a letter out of the folder and handed it to Chee.
Chee read what Window Rock reported, with half of his mind trying to analyze Largo. The way the Navajos calculate kinship, the captain was a relative through clan linkage. Chee's crucial "born to" clan was the Slow Talking Dinee of his mother, but his "born for" clan—the clan of his father—was the Bitter Water People. Largo was born to the Standing Rock Dinee, but was "born for" the Red Forehead Dinee, which was also the secondary "born for" clan of Chee's father. That made kinsmen. Distant kinsmen, true enough, but kinsmen in a culture that made family of first importance and responsibility to relatives the highest value. Chee read the letter and thought about kinship. But he was remembering how a paternal uncle had once cheated him on a used-refrigerator sale, and that the worst whipping he'd ever taken in the Two Gray Hills Boarding School was from a maternal cousin. He handed the letter back to Largo without any comment.
"Whenever there's any trouble out there in the Joint Use Reservation it's usually the Gishis," Largo said. "Them and maybe the Yazzie outfit." He paused, thinking about it. "Or the Begays," he added. 'They're into a lot of trouble." He folded the letter back into the file and handed the file to Chee. "Could be just about anybody," he concluded. "Anyway, get it cleared up."
Chee took the folder. "Get it cleared up," he said.