The Sinister Pig - 15 (20 page)

“I think there is a way out of this for us,” Budge said.

“Tell me,” Diego said.

Winsor’s voice intruded:

“Hey, Budge,” Winsor said. “There’s the ranch up there ahead. You guys knock off that Mex gabbing and pay attention to business. You think that strip looks safe enough?”

“I’ll lose some altitude and circle,” Budge said. “Why take chances.” He flew over the Tuttle Ranch headquarters, the big tile-roofed ranch house, and the row of mobile homes where the hired hands lived, the barns, the stables, the horse pasture, the stock tank with its connected windmill. He studied the landing strip. It was a straight and narrow black band pointing into the prevailing winds. It looked blacker than he remembered, apparently recently stabilized by a fresh coating of oil. The windsock on the pole atop the little hanger reported a mild westerly breeze was blowing. He was low enough to see the nose of the ranch’s little Piper backed into the hanger and to recognize that the dark blue sports utility vehicle parked beside it was a Land Rover.

He turned to look at Winsor. “See anything there you don’t want to see?”

“No. How about you?”

“Looked good,” Budge said, and banked again, completing the circle, leveling off toward the southwest into the landing approach position.

[189] “When we get on the ground, you can leave most of that luggage stowed away. We won’t be here more than a few hours. But I want you to get out that pet rifle of mine, and the gear that goes with it. We’ll take that along when we go out to the pig trap.”

“Pig trap?”

“Pipeliner lingo,” Winsor said. “The pig’s what they call the thing they push down through the pipeline to clean it out, or find leaks, so forth. That gadget you saw on the pipeline at the old smelter, that’s where they put the pig into the pipeline. It’s the pig launcher. When they get the pig where it’s going, they divert it out of the line into a pig trap.”

“Now you’re going to tell me why you’re taking your rifle to the pig trap,” Budge said.

“Going to shoot me a scimitar-horned oryx for my trophy room,” Winsor said. “And maybe I’ll also help you with that job I assigned to you.”

“Killing the cop?” Budge asked. “That woman in the picture? How are we going to find her?”

Winsor laughed. “That’s all arranged,” he said. “Her duty this morning is to drive out to the back gate of the Tuttle Ranch and go take another look at that construction site where she took all those photographs.”

“Oh,” Budge said. He felt sick. Stunned. He’d underestimated Winsor again. He’d thought there was no practical way he’d be expected to find that woman, and he’d dreamed up the scenario he’d been giving to Diego in the hope of forming some sort of alliance if he needed one. He’d thought Winsor was simply exercising his macho bravado. That this problem would go away. But Winsor had found a way to make the nightmare become real.

[190] “When you’re working for me, Budge, you don’t leave things to chance. You arrange things. Like I had them put a big old tarp in the back of the Land Rover. Big enough to keep a trophy-sized oryx head from bleeding all over the upholstery. Plenty big to hold that little cop until we fly her back over the Mexican mountains and drop her off.”

Sergeant Jim Chee had no trouble awakening before dawn in the motel at Lordsburg. He had hardly slept. He couldn’t guide his self-conscious into any of those calm, relaxing reveries that bring on sleep. Instead he listened to Cowboy Dashee, comfortable in the adjoining bed, mixing his snoring with an occasional unfinished, undecipherable sleep-talker statement. Some of it was in English, but since he never finished a sentence, or even a phrase, that was as incomprehensible to Chee as when his muttering was in Hopi.

Before fivea.m. they were dressed, checked out, and down at a truck stop beside Interstate 10. Cowboy ordered pancakes, sausage, and coffee. So did Chee. But he didn’t feel like eating. Cowboy did, and between bites, studied Chee.

“What’s the trouble?” he asked. “Worried, or is it love sick?”

[192] “Worried,” Chee said. “How am I going to get Bernie to quit this damned Border Patrol job and come on home?”

“That’s easy,” Cowboy said.

“Like hell,” Chee said. “You just don’t understand how stubborn she is.”

“That’s not my problem, ole buddy. What I don’t understand is how you can stay so stupid so long.”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full of pancake,” Chee said.

“If you want her to come home, you just say, ‘Bernie, my sweet, I love you dearly. Come home and marry me and we will live happily ever after.’ ”

“Yeah,” Chee said.

“Maybe you’d also have to tell her you’d get rid of that junky old trailer home of yours down by the river, and live in a regular house. Decent insulation, running water, regular beds instead of bunks, all that.”

“Come on, Cowboy. Be serious. I ask Bernie to marry me. She says, ‘Why would I want to do that?’ Then what do I say?”

“You tell her, ‘Because I love you, and you love me, and when that happens, people get married.’ ”

“Dream on,” Chee said, and followed that with a dismissive snort and a brooding silence. Then: “You think so?”

“What?”

“That she likes me?”

“Damn it, Jim, she loves you.”

“I don’t think so. I wouldn’t bet she even likes me.”

“Find out,” Cowboy said. “Ask her.”

Chee sighed. Shook his head.

“What’s the trouble?”

“Cowardice, I guess,” Chee said.

[193] “Afraid she’ll hurt your feelings?”

“You know my record,” Chee said.

“You mean Janet Pete?” Cowboy said. “The way I read that affair, I figured you dumped her instead of vice versa.”

“It wasn’t that simple,” Chee said. “But start with Mary Landon. Remember her. Beautiful blue-eyed blonde teacher at Crownpoint Middle School, and I wanted to marry her, and she liked the idea but she let me know that what she wanted was somebody to take back to her family’s big dairy farm in Wisconsin, and I’d be the male she rescued from the savages.”

“I didn’t know her,” Cowboy said. “I think that was before I disobeyed my family and friends and started associating with you Navajos.”

“You’d have loved her,” Chee said. “I sure thought I did, and it really hurt when I finally understood the feeling wasn’t mutual.”

“How about Janet? I still see her in federal court now and then when her Washington office sends her out on a case. A real classy lady.”

“Different version of the same story,” Chee said. “I was all set to propose to Janet. In fact, I sort of thought I had. Borrowed a videotape a fellow had made of his daughter’s traditional marriage, all that. But it turned out Janet was the perfect model of what the sociologists call assimilation. Dad a city Navajo. Mother a super-sophisticated, high-society Washingtonian socialite. Janet was all set to take me back as her trophy sheep camp Navajo. She had a socially acceptable job picked out for me. The whole package. She didn’t want Jim Chee. She wanted what she thought she could turn him into.”

[194] Through this discourse, Cowboy was finishing his sausage and looking thoughtful. “Twice burned, you’re thinking. So triple cautious. But the Bernie I know, and the one you tell me about, is a bona fide Navajo. She’s not going to want to drag you off somewhere to try to civilize you.”

“I know,” Chee said. “I’ve just got a feeling that if I make a move on her, she’ll just tell me she’s not interested.”

Cowboy stared at him. Shook his head. “Well, I guess there’s lots of reasons she’d kiss you off. Total lack of romantic instincts, for example. Or maybe she’s spotted an abnormal level of stupidity and decided it’s incurable. I’m beginning to see that problem myself.”

With that Cowboy signaled for the waitress, reminded Chee the expenses on this trip were his responsibility, and handed him the breakfast bill.

“Well, anyway, let’s get on down to the Tuttle Ranch and take a look at that sinister construction project of theirs. Come on, Cowboy,” he said. “Eat. Choke it down, or wash it down with your coffee, or bring it along. Let’s go.”

Dashee grumbled but they went, and thus by the time the sun was rising over the Cedar Mountain range to the east, and turning the flat little cloud cap over Hat Top Mountain a glorious pink, they were exiting County Road 146, slowing a little for the sleeping village of Hachita, and creating clouds of dust along the gravel of County Road 81 down the great emptiness of the Hachita Valley.

“You sure you know where we’re going?” Cowboy asked.

“Yes,” Chee said, and he did. But he wasn’t exactly sure how to get there. And Dashee sensed that.

“That map you have there on your lap. Aren’t those [195] the Big Hatchet Mountains over there to our left?”

“Um, yee-aaow, it looks like they ought to be,” Chee said, very slowly and reluctantly.

“Then from what you told me about where that Tuttle Ranch south gate is located, we seem to have missed a turn somewhere. Seems we might be going in the wrong direction.”

“Looks like it.”

“Then let’s stop the next place we get to and ask directions,” Dashee suggested.

“The next place we get to is Antelope Wells. That’s the port of entry on the Mexican border, and it’s about fifty miles south of here, and the last twenty or so, according to this map, are marked unimproved.”

Dashee pulled his BLM truck off the road, parked it among the scattered creosote bushes, and got out.

“Here’s my plan,” he said. “We turn around and head back toward where we came from. You do the driving and I’ll do the navigating. Give me your map. It is well known among us Hopis, and all other tribes, that Navajos aren’t to be relied upon when it comes to understanding maps.”

And so it happened, that it was late morning when Chee finally yelled, “Yes, this is it. I remember driving right past that bunch of mesquite over there. And that soaptree yucca. Take that little right turn there, and up that set of tracks, and up that hill, and from there we can see the Tuttle Ranch south gate.”

“Well, good,” Dashee said. “Getting there on Navajo Time, we other Indians say, means late. But better late than never.”

At the top of the hill they could indeed see the gate, and it was open.

[196] “Maybe I wouldn’t have needed you,” Chee said. “I could have driven right in.”

“No, you’d still be lost. And you’d be asked for your jurisdiction credentials right away, and tossed right out again.”

“Anyway, through the gate and over two hills and then we’re there,” Chee said. “I measured it on my odometer. A fraction less than four miles to go.”

It proved to be 3.7 miles from the gate to the hilltop from which they could see the construction site. And the new building. A dark green Border Patrol pickup was parked behind it.

“Chee said: “Son of a bitch!”

Dashee gave Chee a wry look.

“Is that what she drives?” he asked. “You think Bernie’s there?”

“I hope not,” Chee said. She must be crazy. Why in God’s name would she come out here again. She knows the dopers have her picture. She knows they think she’s dangerous.”

“Let’s talk about that later,” Dashee said. “Now let’s get right on down there. Let’s hope this case of being late is going to be one of those better-than-never times.”

Dashee pulled the car back onto the track in a flurry of dirt-throwing wheel spinning and headed it down the hill.

That morning, Customs Patrol Officer Bernadette Manuelito had pulled her Border Patrol vehicle onto the dusty shoulder of Playas Road, stepped out, taken her jish out of her purse, extracted a little prescription bottle from it, and shook a pinch of corn pollen onto her left palm. She stood a moment, staring eastward toward the Big Hatchet Mountains. A streak of cloud hanging atop the mountain ridge was turned a brilliant yellow by the rising sun, then orange that faded into red. CPO Manuelito sang the chant greeting the sun. She blessed the dawning new day with a sprinkle of pollen and climbed back into the car.

Her prayer this morning, she was thinking, was a bit more fervent than usual. She had set her alarm for fivea.m. and left her home in Rodeo very quietly, not wanting to awaken Eleanda, whose regular breathing she could hear in the adjoining bedroom. Ed Henry’s call had come [198] last night just after she’d watched the weather report on the evening news and hit the sack.