15/03/2008 19:57
TheFallenMan
file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Floop/Local%20Settings/Te...
non-Navajo decision based on an utterly non-Navajo way of thinking. He put down the Manuelito file and buzzed Jenifer.
Officer Manuelito, it seemed, had come in early, and called in about nine saying she was working on the cattle-rustling problem.
Chee allowed himself a rare expletive. What the hell was she doing about cattle theft? She was supposed to be finding witnesses to a homicide at a wild party.
“Would you ask the dispatcher to contact her, please, and ask her to come in?” Chee said.
“Want ’em to tell her why?” Jenifer asked.
“Just tell her I want to talk to her,” Chee said, forgetting to say please.
But what would he say to Officer Manuelito? He’d have time to decide that by the time she got to the office. It would keep him from thinking about what might have provoked Janet’s curiosity about Harold Breedlove, late of the Breedlove family that had been a client of John McDermott.
9
AS IT HAPPENED, OFFICER MANUELITO didn’t get to the office.
“She says she’s stuck,” Jenifer reported. “She went out Route 5010 south of Rattlesnake and turned off on that dirt track that skirts around the west side of Ship Rock. Then she slid off into a ditch.” This amused Jenifer, who chuckled. “I’ll see if I can get somebody to go pull her out.”
“I think I’ll just take care of it myself,” Chee said. “But thanks anyway.” He pulled on his jacket. What the devil was Manuelito doing out in that empty landscape by the Rock with Wings? He’d told her to work her way down a list of people who might be willing to talk about gang membership at Shiprock High School, not practicing her skill at driving in mud.
Just getting out of the parking lot demonstrated to Chee how Manuelito could manage to get stuck. The overnight storm had drifted eastward, leaving the town of Shiprock under a cloudless sky. The temperature was already well above freezing and the sun was making short work of the snow. But even after he shifted into four-wheel drive, Chee’s truck did some wheel-spinning. The ditches beside the highway were already carrying runoff water and a cloud of white steam swirled over the asphalt where the moisture was evaporating.
Navajo Route 5010, according to the road map, was “improved.” Which meant it was graded now and then and in theory at least had a gravel surface. On a busy day, probably six or eight vehicles would use it. This morning, Officer Manuelito’s patrol car had been the first to leave its tracks in the snow and Chee’s pickup was number two. Chee noted approvingly that she had made a slow and careful left turn off of 5010 onto an unnumbered access road that led toward Ship Rock—thereby leaving no skid marks. He made the same turn, felt his rear wheels slipping, corrected, and eased the truck gingerly down the road.
All muscles were tense, all senses alert. He was enjoying testing his skill against the slick road surface. Enjoying the clean, cold air in his lungs, the gray-and-white patterns of soft snow on sage and salt bush and chamisa, enjoying the beauty, the vast emptiness, and a silence broken only by the sound of his truck’s engine and its tires in the mud. The immense basalt monolith of Ship Rock towered beside him, its west face still untouched by the warming sun and thus still coated with its whitewash of snow. The Fallen Man must have prayed for that sort of moisture before his thirst killed him on that lonely ledge.
Then the truck topped a hillock, and there was Officer Bernadette Manuelito, a tiny figure standing beside her stuck patrol car, representing an unsolved administrative problem, the end of joy, and a reminder of how good life had been when he was just a patrolman. Ah, well, there was a bright side. Even from here he could see that Manuelito had stuck her car so thoroughly that there would be no hope of towing it out with his vehicle. He’d simply give her a ride back to the office and send out a tow truck.
Officer Manuelito had seemed to Lieutenant Jim Chee to be both unusually pretty and unusually young to be wearing a Navajo Tribal Police uniform. This morning she wouldn’t have made that impression. She looked tired and disheveled and at least her age, which Chee knew from her personnel records was twenty-six years. She also looked surly. He leaned across the pickup seat and opened the door for her.
“Tough luck,” he said. “Get your stuff out of it, and the weapons, and lock it up. We’ll send out a tow truck to get it when the mud dries.”
Officer Manuelito had prepared an explanation of how this happened and would not be deterred.
“The snow covered up a little wash, there. Drifted it full so you couldn’t see it. And . . . “
“It could happen to anybody,” Chee said. “Let’s go.”
“You didn’t bring a tow chain?”
“I did bring a tow chain,” Chee said. “But look at it. There’s no traction now. It’s clay and it’s too soft.” 24 of 102
15/03/2008 19:57
TheFallenMan
file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Floop/Local%20Settings/Te...
“You have four-wheel drive,” she said.
“I know,” Chee said, feeling in no mood to debate this. “But that just means you dig yourself in by spinning four wheels instead of two. I couldn’t budge it. Get your stuff and get in.”
Officer Manuelito brushed a lock of hair off her forehead, leaving a streak of gray mud. Her lips parted with a response, then closed.
“Yes, sir,” she said.
That was all she said. Chee backed the pickup to a rocky place, turned it, and slipped and slid his way back to 5010 in leaden silence. Back on the gravel, he said:
“Did you know that Diamonte filed a complaint against you? Charged you with harassment.” Officer Manuelito was staring out the windshield. “No,” she said. “But I knew he said he was going to.”
“Yep,” Chee said. “He did. Said you were hanging around. Bothering his customers.”
“His dope buyers.”
“Some of them, probably,” Chee said.
Manuelito stared relentlessly out of the windshield.
“What were you doing?” Chee asked.
“You mean besides harassing his customers?”
“Besides that,” Chee said, thinking that the very first thing he would do when they got back to the office was approve this woman’s transfer to anywhere. Preferably to Tuba City, which was about as far as he could get her from Shiprock. He glanced at her, waiting for a reply. She was still focused on the windshield.
“You know what he runs out there?” she said.
“I know what he used to do when I was assigned here before,” Chee said. “In those days he wholesaled booze to the reservation bootleggers, fenced stolen property, handled some marijuana. Things like that. Now I understand he’s branched out into more serious dope.”
“That’s right,” she said. “He still supplies the creeps who push pot and now he’s selling the worse stuff, too.”
“That’s what I always heard,” Chee said. “And most recently from Teddy Begayaye. The kid Begayaye picked up at the community college last week named Diamonte as his source for coke. But then he changed his mind and decided he just couldn’t remember where he got it.”
“I know Diamonte’s selling it.”
“So you bring in your evidence. We take it to the captain, he takes it to the federal prosecutors, or maybe the San Juan County cops, and we put the bastard in jail.”
“Sure,” Manuelito said.
“But we don’t go out there, with no evidence, and harass his customers. There’s a law against it.” Chee sensed that she was no longer staring at the windshield. She was looking at him.