The Sinister Pig - 15 (2 page)

Mankin nodded.

“OK, then. Let’s say you called your broker and asked him who owned Seamless Weld. He’d call you back in a few days and tell you it was a subsidiary of Searigs Inc. And you’d say, who owns Searigs, and after the proper period for checking, he’d tell you the principal stockholder was A.G.H. Industries Inc. And the answer to your next question is that the majority stock holder in A.G.H. is a trust, the affairs of which are entrusted to a Washington law firm, and the law firm lists four partners, one of whom is Mr. Rawley Winsor of Washington, D.C. End of answer.”

“I’ve heard that name. But who is Rawley Winsor?”

“No genuine Washington insider would have to ask that,” Slate said. “Nor would anyone on Wall Street. Rawley Winsor is ... How do I start? He’s a many-generations blue blood, echelons of high society, Princeton, then Harvard Law, famous Capitol deal doer, fund-raisers, top-level runner of lobby campaigns, and might make the top of
Fortune
magazine’s most-wealthy list if his investments weren’t so carefully hidden.”

“So if I was free to speculate, I might guess that your senator is either doing a deal for this Winsor plutocrat, or seeking a way to link him with evildoing. For example, maybe finding how to prove this guy is getting a slice of the suspected rip-off of tribal royalty funds. Or maybe a way for the senator to get his own cut of that graft.”

Slate laughed. “I am not free to comment on speculation.”

“But if he is so incredibly rich, why go to all this trouble for what must be just small change for him?”

[8] “Joy of the game, maybe,” Slate said. “Hell, I don’t know. Maybe Winsor just can’t stand seeing some other power broker getting easy money that he’s not sharing. Right now, for example, everybody knows he’s running the lobby against a bill to legalize medical use of marijuana. Why? Because he’s afraid it would lead to legalizing drugs—making them government licensed, taxed, et cetera. Why is he against that? Lot of people are, because it has proven to be a counterproductive waste of public money. But that wouldn’t be Winsor’s motive. Nobody knows what that is. Not for sure. But we Washington cynics think it’s because he has a finger in the narcotics import trade. Legalizing and licensing knocks out the profits. Government sells it at fixed prices, grows it in the farm belt, taxes the hell out of it. No more recruiting of new addicts by your teenaged salesmen, no more knife fights and gun battles for market territory.” Slate sighed. “Not that any of that matters.”

“Come on, now,” Mankin said. “This guy is a multi-billionaire. Dabbling in the drug trade isn’t just a fun competition. I can’t believe he’d be that dumb.”

“Probably not,” Slate said. “Maybe it’s psychological. My wife has three pet cats. One of them will eat all he can hold, and then stand guard at the bowl to keep the other two from having their dinner. Snarl, and claw to fight ’em off. Are humans smarter than cats?”

Mankin nodded. “You know any farmyard French?”

“Just English for me,” Slate said.

“Anyway, French farmers have a phrase for the boss pig in the sty—the one that would guard the trough and attack any animal that tried to steal a bite. Translate it to French and it’s
pore sinistre.
We used to use that for [9] Saddam—for trying to take Iran’s oil fields when he had more oil than he could use, and then invading Kuwait for the same reason.”

“ ‘Sinister pig,’ right?” Slate asked. “But isn’t it
cochon sinistre
. I think that makes a better insult. And it would fit Rawley Winsor, from what I hear about him.”

That lunch and conversation had been on Monday. The newly named Carl Mankin called his wife to tell her he’d be going to New Mexico for several days. Then he took a taxi to the Department of Energy, called on the proper friend, and collected the information he needed about who managed which pipelines and the ebb and flow, sales and resales, of oil and gas in and out of the San Juan Basin fields. He left the building with his pocket recorder full of notes about the San Juan Basin fields— about nineteen hundred oil, gas, and methane wells actively producing in just the New Mexico section of that field, and drilling rigs adding new ones every year, with geologists estimating that more than a hundred trillion cubic feet of gas is under the rocks there, and about twenty different oil, gas, and pipeline companies fighting for a share of the treasure. Making the job look even more impossible, his notes confirmed what he’d guessed would be true. The records kept by the Department of the Interior were in shambles, and had been a total mess dating back as far as his sources had looked—which was into the 1940s. It was hopeless, he thought, but for fifty thousand dollars whether he learned anything or not, it would be an interesting project.

And now it was two Mondays later. He was about fifteen hundred miles west of the chic Bistro Bis of the Hotel George and Washington’s E Street. He was sitting [10] in a Jeep Cherokee beside a dirt road at the fringe of the Bisti Oil-Gas field, close to where the Jicarilla Apache reservation meets the Navajo Nation in the very heart of America’s version of the Persian Gulf—the San Juan Basin.

More important, Carl Mankin had just realized he was being followed—and that this had been going on since the evening after he’d left the Seamless Weld office in El Paso in the rental Jeep. It was a bad feeling for Carl Mankin. He’d learned how to spot a tail more than thirty years ago in Lebanon, taught by an old CIA hand in the Beirut embassy. He’d practiced the skill of being invisible in Iraq when Saddam and his Republican Guards were fighting the Iranians as our Cold War ally. He’d used it again when Saddam was becoming our Desert Storm enemy, and refined it to perfection in Yemen, where the Al Qaeda was plotting its terrorism. He had become very good at knowing who was walking behind him.

But two lazy years in Washington must have made him careless. Across the street from the Seamless Weld office he’d seen the man now tailing him, noticing him because he wore a forked beard and not because Mankin suspected anything. He saw him again when he came out of the FBI office in Gallup—in a car in the parking lot. He’d seen that forked beard a third time a few minutes ago, the face of a man sitting on the passenger side of a Dodge pickup reflected in the rearview mirror of the Jeep Cherokee Mankin was driving.

Three sightings at three very different locations were too many for coincidence. Of course, the man had to be a rank amateur. No professional would wear such a memorable beard. Probably no danger involved here. Why [11] would there be danger? It would just be someone wanting to know why a stranger was looking into a very lucrative and competitive business. But those old instincts of caution Mankin developed working in enemy territory had abruptly revived. The man had gotten on his trail at Seamless Weld in El Paso. How? Or why?

One isn’t followed for love and kindness. Perhaps the senator, or whomever the senator was working for, connected him to Seamless because they suspected that company was involved in the corruption. Thus that would be the place to start him looking for connections.

He watched the pickup roll past on the road just below him, Forked Beard out of his line of vision. Its driver, a younger man wearing a blue baseball cap, glanced at the Cherokee and quickly looked away. Just the sort of thing professionals were taught never to do.

Carl Mankin waited, listening to the pickup moving slowly down the dirt road, hearing the crows quarreling in the pines and the sounds of the breeze in the trees. Relaxing. Feeling the old familiar tension slip away. He stepped out of the Jeep, listening. The crows left. The breeze faded. Mankin held his breath. Silence. How could the truck have gotten out of hearing range so quickly? Perhaps in a thicker patch of forest. Perhaps down a slope.

Some of the tension had returned now, but Mankin had driven two hours to reach this place. The metal structure across the road from him, so he’d been told by the driver of a Haliburton repair truck, was a pipeline junction switching point. “A lot of work going on out there,” the man had said. “Installing some new measurement stuff and a bigger compressor. Why the hell would they be doing that? I couldn’t guess.”

[12] Mankin couldn’t guess either. But the “new measurement stuff” suggested a possibility that maybe the old measurements had been less than accurate, and maybe that had been intentional, to cover up some cheating on the records, and maybe that was the sort of thing he was looking for. Probably not. But he’d come this far. He would walk over and see what he could see.

He stopped that short walk twice to listen. He heard the sound the breeze made in the pines and crows arguing a long way down the road. Otherwise nothing. The building was locked, as he’d guessed it would be, since no vehicles were parked there. He peered through the dusty window and saw what he’d expected to see. A compressor, tanks, gauges, a worktable, pipes of various dimensions, valves, etcetera. Just what he had seen in such places in oil-patch country from the Middle East to Alaska to Indonesia to Wyoming. But he saw no sign of any work currently going on.

He was recrossing the road, almost back to the Jeep, when he saw Forked Beard for the fourth time. The man was standing under the trees beyond the Jeep, the younger man in the blue baseball cap stood beside him. Both men were looking at him. Blue Cap held a rifle and the rifle was swinging toward him.

Carl Mankin spun into a running crouch. Old as he was, he was quick. He made at least a dozen long running steps before the bullet hit him, midback, between the shoulder blades, and knocked him facedown into the dirt.

“Well, look at this,” said Cowboy Dashee, grinning up at Sergeant Jim Chee. “I’ll bet that any minute now you’re going to be asking me to go ahead and handle this guy. Doing me a favor. Giving me a chance to keep my hand in on such things as murder.”

Dashee was standing beside the body of a medium-sized male, gray-blond hair cut into a burr, sprawled facedown in a brushy growth of mountain mahogany, partly covered with dead leaves and debris, maybe by the wind or maybe for concealment.

“Feel free,” said Chee. “You probably could use a refresher on your crime scene technique now that you’re sort of a bureaucrat.”

Dashee was a Hopi, and thus untroubled by Chee’s traditional Navajo aversion to handling corpses, and Dashee might have been wearing the uniform of his Federal Bureau of Land Management law-enforcement unit. [14] Today he was off duty and in his more casual attire—jeans and well-worn T-shirt. He’d been drinking coffee in Chee’s Navajo Tribal Police Shiprock office when Chee’s telephone buzzed. An El Paso Natural Gas employee had noticed a dead man in a ditch out northeast of Degladito Mesa where Navajo country bumps into the Jicarilla Apache Reservation.

“Notice how careful I am with your crime scene,” Dashee said. “I avoid stepping where whoever hauled our victim in here stepped. Or where the victim himself might have stepped when he walked in here to kill himself.”

“OK,” Chee said. “Get on with it.”

“I’m not always so careful,” Dashee said, “but this is probably a felony murder on the Navajo Reservation, which means the FBI is going to take over soon as somebody tells them about it, and if it turns out to be a tough case, then the Bureau will need someone to blame when they screw it up. I don’t want it to be Officer Cowboy Dashee. Been there and done that back when I was a deputy sheriff.”

“So far you’ve been flawless,” Chee said, watching Dashee checking the body.

“Hole in the back of jacket,” Dashee said. “Probably the entry place. But no blood that I can see and no powder marks. I’ll get some close-up photos before I move the body.”

“I’ll go call it in,” Chee said.

“I’m avoiding my usual sloppiness because I’m remembering all the trouble your girlfriend got into. Officer Bernie thinking the guy in the truck was just another [15] dead drunk, instead of a shot-dead drunk.” Dashee paused to chuckle at his pun. “And the shot wasn’t from a whiskey glass.”

“I guess you’re talking about Officer Manuelito,” Chee said, no longer looking amused. “She’s not my girlfriend.”

“I heard she’d left you. I meant girlfriend then. Meant ‘used-to-be’ girlfriend.”

“Not then, either,” Chee said. “She worked for me. You don’t make moves on women who work for you.”

“You don’t?” said Dashee, making it sound surprised. But Chee was already walking back to his car radio.

He gave the FBI dispatcher directions to the scene.

“Highway 64 east through Gobernador, then through Vaqueros Canyon nine miles, then left over a cattle guard on dirt gas field road. Seven miles north to junction with another dirt road that leads to El Paso Gas Buzzard Wash lease. Left on that. He’ll see my unit parked there.”

“It’ll be Special Agent Osborne,” the dispatcher said. “I’ll tell him to call you when he gets lost.”

Dashee had walked down the slope from the crime scene, dusting off his hands and grinning.

“How much do you usually pay the shaman when he does the Ghost Way sing for you to cure you of corpse sickness?” Dashee asked. “I think that might be an appropriate tip to give me.”

“I’ll just deduct that from what I was going to charge you for the crime scene lesson,” Chee said.