“I don’t know,” Leaphorn said. “But I think I’d call Bernie about the car rental agreement and Seamless Weld.”
“I will,” Chee said.
Professor Bourbonette smiled at him. “I think you should drive down there and discuss it with her.”
9
When Customs Service District Supervisor Ed Henry was a seventh grader in Denver he’d found a way intelligence and technical skills could augment income. His mother gave him a daily quarter for the pay phone at the bus stop outside Aspen Middle School. He’d call her at the laundry where she worked. If her duties kept her overtime, he’d take the city bus home and get supper started. Otherwise he’d do his homework at the bus stop until she picked him up.
To Henry this phone call had seemed a needless expense. Henry avoided it by drilling a hole through his quarter in shop class and threading a copper wire through it. With practice, he perfected the system. Drop the quarter in the slot, hear the sound of it being registered, then quickly pull it out for repeated use.
At first this merely saved Henry his quarters. But when another kid saw what he was doing, Henry used the same system to give the boy a free call. From that came the idea of cashing in on his wait beside the telephone booth, serving other students who showed up to call home. Henry charged a dime per call, thereby saving the customer fifteen cents.
When Henry’s mother inquired about his new affluence he explained it. She rated it questionable, but as only American Telephone and Telegraph was the loser, her only instruction to Ed was to be careful, keep his mouth shut, and not overdo it.
An academic scholarship took Ed Henry to a smallish college in one of those Texas counties that continued to prohibit alcoholic beverages under the state’s local option law. Telephones there made the coin-recovery business impossible, but it was far more profitable to drive his old car across the county line, fill the whiskey orders from fraternity and sorority students, and deliver the bottles to prearranged hiding places under bushes. Following his mother’s “be careful” advice, Henry had discreetly approached the appropriate police captain and arranged a system of splitting the profits. That plan left him enough to make his car payments and send a little home to augment his mother’s income—which was failing along with her health.
This eventually led Ed Henry to the U.S. Customs Service, the Border Patrol, and to where he sat in his office this particular morning going through the personnel file of Bernadette Manuelito, his newest charge, and wondering if he had any reason to be worried about her. His mother’s stroke had forced Henry to drop out of college, but his flawless performance of his end of the deal with the police captain had earned him an enthusiastic recommendation from the captain to a friend in a Denver area juvenile detention system. Henry became a reformatory officer, moved from that to a sheriff’s deputy job, and from that to the Customs Service—each time helped along by recommendations from superiors who appreciated his diligence, his intelligence, his reliability, and his talent for getting along with everyone. As the sheriff had said in his letter to Customs Service: “Mr. Henry honestly likes people. He enjoys helping folks and it pays off in their cooperation.”
Which was true. Ed Henry liked Bernadette Manuelito from the very first, an intelligent, levelheaded young woman a bit like his own daughter. She had a lot to learn about border patrolling, but she would learn fast, being energetic and eager. Maybe a wee bit too eager, Ed Henry was thinking. His bedside telephone had rung just a few minutes after seven a.m., which would be just a little after nine in Washington, or maybe New York. It was The Man, and The Man had sounded grim.
“Henry,” he said, “why was one of your people out on the Tuttle Ranch?”
“What?” Henry had said, trying to get himself fully awake, trying to figure out what this was about. “I didn’t send an agent out there.”
“Woman cop with Border Patrol credentials. Woman named Manuelito. She was following Gonzales and she took a bunch of pictures. Tell me why.”
All Henry could tell The Man was that Bernie was a new recruit in the Shadow Wolf tracking unit and he’d sent her into the boot heel territory to try her hand at picking up some trails the illegals had been using. That did not please The Man.
“I’ll call you back in three hours at your office number. I want you to tell me then why she was following Gonzales and why she was taking pictures and what her connections are. And get those pictures and see to it that they get to me.”
“I can tell you she’s a Navajo. Had been with the Navajo Tribal Police and—” Henry stopped. The line was dead.
“That son of a bitch,” Henry said. He sat on his bed, floor cool under his bare feet, wondering just what The Man looked like. He knew him only by his voice, and heard that rarely since his connection in this sideline job was the very polite fellow from Juarez who called himself Carlos Delo and who had showed Henry how he could augment his income on the border as efficiently as he had in college. Delo seemed to get his instructions from the East Coast voice, passed the word along when a favor was needed from Henry, and arranged deposits in an El Paso bank account later.
Henry had heard the voice only three times before, always at moments of some sort of crisis, but he recognized it instantly: the effete East Coast intellectual sound—the Kennedy broad “a,” the softness at the wrong places. Henry had pictured him as having a sort of long, narrow, British royalty face, thin lips, neatly coifed white hair. A bank official, probably, with a limo waiting for him about forty floors below, calling some low-level flunkey in New Mexico just to make sure a loan he’d signed off on was being protected. Well—
The telephone rang. Henry looked at it, grimaced, picked it up, and said: “Yes.”
“You’re going to get a call from The Man,” this voice said. It was the clipped, precise sound of Charley Delo. “He is pissed off.”
“What’s going on?”
“Henry, you know they don’t tell me, and I don’t ask ’em. They tell me what to do, and I do it. And if I need some help from you, I tell you what I need. That’s how we make a living.”
“Who is that arrogant son of a bitch? I see him as a very important loan officer in a very lofty bank and he’s overseeing an export-import business that wouldn’t have Customs Service approval.”
“I don’t know, and you don’t want to know. All I know is he doesn’t want Customs cops messing around out there around the Brockman Hills. He wants you to make sure they won’t.”
“I told him I didn’t send anyone out there.”
“You need to get hold of that woman Customs Officer and find out what the hell she was doing, and get those pictures to me. Get ’em to the bank in Juarez and leave them in our safety deposit box. He also wants a picture of that woman cop.”
Henry held the telephone away from his ear and rubbed his forehead. “Hey,” the voice was saying. “Hey. You there.”
“Yeah,” Henry said.
“You hear what I said.”
“Yes,” Henry said. “I heard you.”
10
Customs Officer Bernadette Manuelito was driving west on Inte7rstate Highway 10, heading toward the intersection with State Road 146, when her telephone beeper distracted her. She intended to take 146 south to the village of Hatchita, where 146, for no reason she could discern, became State Road 81, and stay on 81 until it met the Mexican border. Judging from her map, she could see it simply ended there. Bernie’s goal was to continue following Supervisor Henry’s instructions.