"Somebody already got shot," he said. "Couple of people got shot, including Gorman."
"I meant somebody new," Bales said.
"If it's not you," Chee said, "that leaves me, or Sharkey, or that other fbi agent he brought along. Or maybe Old Man Begay."
"I don't think so," Bales said. "I think it would need to be one of us, the way this premonition feels." Satisfied now that Chee was listening, Bales inhaled deeply and allowed a moment of silence while he savored the taste of the tobacco.
Mary Landon had stirred her coffee, looking at it and not at him. "You've made up your mind to stay," she'd said. "Haven't you. When were you going to tell me?" And he'd said what? Something stupid or insensitive, probably. He couldn't remember exactly what he'd said. But he remembered her words—vividly, clearly, exactly.
"Whatever you say about it, it just has one meaning. It means I come second. What comes first is Jim Chee, being Navajo. I'm to be sort of an appendage to his life. Mrs. Chee and the Navajo children." He'd interrupted her, denying that accusation, and she had said the Navajo Way was important to him only when it reinforced what he already wanted to do. She'd said that before, and he knew exactly what was coming. The Navajos, she'd reminded him, married into the wife's clan. The husband joined the wife's family. "How about that, Jim Chee?" she'd asked. There was nothing he could say to her.
The deputy exhaled again and rolled down the window a bit to let the cold air suck out the smoke. "Always chaps my butt the way the fbi won't ever tell you anything," he said. "The subject is Albert Gorman." Bales raised the pitch of his voice a notch in a weak attempt to mimic the West Texas sound of Agent Sharkey. " 'Gorman is believed armed with a thirty-eight-caliber pistol.' " Bales switched back to his own rusty voice. "Believed, hell. They took a thirty-eight slug out of the guy he shot." Bales switched voices again. " 'Los Angeles informs us that it is particularly important to apprehend this subject alive. He is wanted for questioning.'" Bales snorted. "Ever arrest anyone who wasn't wanted for questioning about something?" Bales chuckled. "Like how many beers he had before he started driving."
Chee grunted. He eased the carryall around a place where the soil was cut away from a ridge of stone. The rearview mirror assured him again that Sharkey's pickup was still behind him.
"I don't see how we can compromise," Mary Landon had said. "I just don't see how we can work it out." And he'd said, "Sure, Mary. Sure we can." But she was right. How could you compromise it? Either he stayed with the Navajo Police or he took a job off the reservation. Either he stayed Navajo or he turned white. Either they raised their children in Albuquerque, or Albany, or some other white city as white children or they raised them on the Colorado Plateau as Dinee. Halfway was worse than either way. Chee had seen enough of that among displaced Navajos in the border towns to know. There was no compromise solution.
"You know what we heard?" the deputy said. "We heard that this business was tied up with an fbi agent getting killed out in L.A. We heard that Gorman and Lerner, the guy he shot at the laundry, was both working for some outfit on the Coast. Some outfit that stole cars. Big operation. And some big shots got indicted. And an fbi agent got knocked off. And that's why the Feds are so hot to talk to this Gorman."
"Um," Chee said. He steered the carryall cautiously around a juniper, but not cautiously enough. The left front wheel dropped into a hole the parking lights hadn't revealed. The jarring jolt shook the deputy's hat down over his eyes.
"The car the dead guy was driving," the deputy said. "It was rented there at the Farmington airport. They tell you that?"
"No," Chee said. As a matter of fact, they hadn't told him anything much—which was exactly what Chee had learned to expect when he was running errands for the Federals. "Got a little job for you," Captain Largo said. "We need to find that fellow in the parking lot." It had seemed an odd thing to say, since the Shiprock agency of the Navajo Tribal Police, along with every other cop along the Arizona-New Mexico border, had all been looking for that fellow. But Chee had also come to expect Largo to say odd things. Largo had then explained himself by handing Chee a folder. It included a copy of the photograph of Albert Gorman that the fbi had provided, a rap sheet showing several arrests and one conviction for larceny of motor vehicles, and some biographical statistics. There were no blank spaces on the forms used by the Los Angeles Police Department for the sort of information Chee needed: Gorman's mother's name and her clan, which Albert Gorman had been "born to," and the clan of Gorman's father, which Albert had been "born for." Unless Albert Gorman had forgotten how to be a Navajo in Los Angeles or, as sometimes happened off the reservation, had never learned the Navajo Way, the homes of these clansmen would be the place to look for Albert Gorman. Largo knew that.
"What I want you to do is drop everything else you're fooling around with. Just come up with this guy," Largo had said. "He didn't pass the roadblocks at Teec Nos Pos, and we had a car there fifteen minutes after the shooting, so he didn't go west. And he didn't get to the roadblock at Sheep Springs, so he didn't get through us going south. So unless he turned east to Burnham, and that road doesn't go anyplace, he must have gone up into the Chuskas."
Chee had agreed to that, mentally changing the "must have" into a "most likely."
Largo pushed himself out of his chair and walked to the wall map, a bulky man with a barrel chest and thin hips—the top-heavy wedge shape so common among western Navajos. He waved a finger around a portion of the map encompassing the Shiprock massif, the Carrizo and Lukachukai mountains, the north end of the Chuskas, and the country between them. "Narrows it down to this little area," Largo said. "See how quick you can find him."
The little area was about the size of Connecticut, but its population wouldn't be more than a few hundred. And the few hundred would be people who would unfailingly notice and remember anything unusual. If Gorman had driven his green sedan into the country south of Teec Nos Pos, or west of Littlewater, it would have been seen and talked about and remembered—the subject of speculation. It was simply a matter of driving and driving and driving, and talking and talking and talking, for however many days it took to track it down. "How quick I find him depends on how lucky I get," Chee said.
"Get lucky, then," Largo said. "And when you find him, just call in. Don't try to arrest him. Don't go anywhere near him. Don't do nothing to spook him. Just get on the radio and get word to us, and we tell the Agency." Largo was leaning against the map, staring at Chee, expression neutral at best. "Understand what I'm saying? Don't screw it up. It's an fbi case. It is not, repeat not, a case for the Navajo Tribal Police. It's an Agency case. It is not our affair. It is not the affair of Officer Jim Chee. Got it?"
"Sure," Chee said.
"Chee finds. Chee calls in. Chee leaves it at that. Chee does not do any freelance screwing around," Largo said.
"Right," Chee said.
"I mean it," Largo said. "I don't know much about it, but from what I hear, this guy is tied up somehow or other with some big case in Los Angeles. And an fbi agent got killed." Largo paused long enough to allow Chee to consider what that meant. "That means that when the fbi says they want to talk to this guy, they really want to talk to him. You just find him."
And so Chee had found him and now, having found him, was guiding in the fbi to finish the job, with Deputy Bales along to properly represent the San Juan County Sheriffs Department.