A Thief of Time Page 4

  “Yes sir.” Chee was paying attention now. Too late.

  “I want you to keep an eye on that place. Hang around there on your shift. Get past there every chance you get. And make chances. Call the dispatcher to keep it on record that you’re watching. When they finish their inventory and find out they’ve lost other stuff, I don’t want ’em in a position to blame us. Understand?”

  Chee understood. Not that it helped.

  That was Monday afternoon. Monday evening it got worse. Even worse than it might have been, because he didn’t learn about it until Tuesday.

  As instructed, Chee had been hanging close to the motor pool. He would coast out Highway 550 maybe as far as the Hogback formation, which marked the eastern edge of the Big Reservation. Then he would drift back past the motor pool fence and into Shiprock. Stopping now and then to check the gate. Noticing that the summer’s accumulation of tumbleweeds piled along the chain-link fence was undisturbed. Drifting down 550 again. Drifting back. Keeping Farmington-Shiprock traffic holding nervously in the vicinity of the speed limit. Boring himself into sleepiness. Calling in now and then to have the dispatcher record that he was diligently watching the motor pool and that all there remained serene.

  “Unit Eleven checking at the motor pool,” Chee called. “All quiet. No sign of entry.”

  “Since you’re there on five-fifty,” the dispatcher said, “see what’s going on at the Seven-Eleven. Just had a disturbance call.”

  Chee had done a quick U-turn, boredom replaced by the uneasiness that always preceded the probability of dealing with a drunk. Or two drunks. Or however many drunks it was taking to disturb the peace at the Shiprock 7-Eleven.

  But the parking space in front of the convenience store had been quiet—empty except for an old Dodge sedan and a pickup truck. No drunks. Inside, no drunks either. The woman behind the cash register was reading one of those tabloids convenience stores sell. A green-ink headline proclaimed THE TRUTH ABOUT LIZ TAYLOR’S WEIGHT LOSS. Another declared SIAMESE TWINS BOTH PREGNANT. BLAME MINISTER. A teenaged boy was inspecting the canned soda pop in the cooler.

  “What’s the trouble?” Chee asked.

  The teenager put down the Pepsi he’d selected, looking guilty. The cashier lowered her paper. She was a middle-aged Navajo woman. Towering House Clan, Chee remembered, named Gorman, or Relman, or something like that. Anglo-type name with six letters. Bunker. Walker. Thomas.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Somebody called in a disturbance here. What’s the trouble?”

  “Oh,” the Towering House woman said. “We had a drunk in here. Where you been?”

  “What’d he do? Any damages?”

  “She,” the woman said. “Old Lady George. She went away when she heard me calling the police.”

  The cashier’s name was Gorman, Chee now remembered. But he was thinking of Old Lady George.

  “Which way did she go?”

  “Just went,” Mrs. Gorman said. She gestured vaguely. “Didn’t look. I was picking up the cans she knocked over.”

  So Chee had gone looking for Old Lady George. He knew her fairly well. She’d been a witness in an automobile theft case he’d worked on—a very helpful witness. Later, when he was looking for one of her grandsons on an assault warrant, she’d helped him again. Sent the boy down to the station to turn himself in. Besides, she was Streams Come Together Clan, which was linked to Chee’s father’s clan, which made her a relative. Chee had been raised knowing that you watch out for your relatives.

  He had watched out for her, first up and down 550 and then up and down side streets. He found her sitting on a culvert, and talked her into the patrol car, and took her home and turned her over to a worried young woman who he guessed must be a granddaughter. Then he had gone back and established that the motor pool remained intact. At least it seemed to be intact as seen from the highway. But seen from the highway, it hadn’t been possible to detect that someone had tinkered with the padlock securing the gate. He heard about that the next day when he reported for work.

  Captain Largo’s usually big voice was unusually quiet—an ominous sign.

  “A backhoe,” Largo said. “That’s what they stole this time. About three tons. Bright yellow. Great big thing. I told Mr. Zah that I had one of my best men watching his place last night. Officer Jim Chee. I told Zah that it must be just another case of forgetting to put it down on the record when somebody borrowed it. You know what he said to me?”

  “No sir,” Chee said. “But nobody stole that on my shift. I was driving back and forth past there the whole time.”

  “Really,” Largo said. “How nice.” He picked up a sheet from the shift squeal report from his desk. He didn’t look at it. “I’m pleased to hear that. Because you know what Zah said to me? He said”—Largo shifted his voice up the scale—“‘Oh, it was stolen last night all right. The guy that runs the service station across the street there told us about it.’” Largo’s voice returned to normal. “This service station man stood there and watched ’em drive out with it.”

  “Oh,” Chee said, thinking it must have been while he was at the 7-Eleven.

  “This Zah is quite a comedian. He told me you’d think sneaking a big yellow backhoe out with one of my policemen watching would be like trying to sneak moonrise past a coyote.”

  Chee flushed. He had nothing to say to that. He had heard the simile before somewhere in another form. Hard as sneaking sunrise past a rooster, it had been. A moonrise without a coyote baying was equally impossible, and relating a coyote to Largo’s police added a nicely oblique insult. You don’t call a Navajo a coyote. The only thing worse is to accuse him of letting his kinfolks starve.

  Largo handed Chee the squeal sheet. It confirmed what Zah had told Largo.

  Subject Delbert Tsosie informed Officer Shorty that while serving a customer at the Texaco station at approximately 10 P.M. he noticed a man removing the chain from the gate of the motor pool maintenance yard across Highway 550. He observed a truck towing a flatbed trailer drive through the gate into the yard. Subject Tsosie said that approximately fifteen minutes later he noticed the truck driving out the gate towing a machine which he described as probably a backhoe or some sort of trenching machine loaded on the trailer. He said he did not report this to police because he presumed tribal employees had come to get the equipment to deal with some sort of emergency.

  “That must have been while I was looking for Old Lady George,” Chee said. He explained, hurrying through the last stages because of Largo’s expression.

  “Get to work,” Largo said, “and leave this alone. Sergeant Benally will be chasing the backhoe. Don’t mess with it.”

  That was Tuesday morning and should have been the very bottom of the week. The pits. It would have been, perhaps, had not Chee driven past the Texaco station on 550 and seen Delbert Tsosie stacking tires. Benally was handling it, but Chee sometimes bought gasoline from Tsosie. No harm in stopping to talk.

  “No,” Tsosie said. “Didn’t see either one of them well enough to recognize ’em. But you could see one was Dineh—tall, skinny Navajo. Had on a cowboy hat. I know a lot of ’em that works at the motor pool. They come over here and use the Coke machine and buy candy. Wasn’t none I knew and I was thinking it was a funny time to be coming to work. But I thought they must have forgotten something and was coming for it. And when I saw the backhoe I figured some pipe broke somewhere. Emergency, you know.” Tsosie shrugged.

  “You didn’t recognize anybody?”

  “Bad light.”

  “Guy in the truck. You see him at all?”

  “Not in the truck,” Tsosie said. “The skinny Navajo was driving the truck. This guy was following in a sedan. Plymouth two-door. About a ’70, ’71 maybe. Dark blue but they was doing some bodywork on it. Had an off-color right front fender. Looked white or gray. Maybe primer coat. And lots of patches here and there, like they was getting ready to paint it.”

  “Driver not a Navajo?”

 
“Navajo driving the truck. Belagana driving the Plymouth. And the white guy, I just barely got a look at him. They all sort of look alike anyway. All I notice is freckles and sunburn.”

  “Big or little?”

  Tsosie thought. “About average. Maybe sort of short and stocky.”

  “What color hair?”

  “Had a cap on. Baseball cap. With a bill.”

  None of which would have mattered since Benally was handling it, and Tsosie had already told Benally all of this, and probably more. But Saturday morning Chee saw the Plymouth two-door.

  It was dark blue, about a ’70 model. When it passed him going in the other direction—Shiprock-bound on 550—he saw the mismatched front fender and the patches of primer paint on its doors and the baseball cap on the head of the white man driving it. Without a thought, Chee did a U-turn across the bumpy divider.

  He was driving Janet Pete’s car. Not exactly Janet Pete’s car. Janet had put down earnest money on a Buick Riviera at Quality Pre-owned Cars in Farmington and had asked Chee to test-drive it for her. She had to go to Phoenix Friday and when she got back Monday she wanted to close the deal.

  “I guess I’ve already decided,” Janet had told him. “It has everything I need and only fourteen thousand miles on it and the price seems reasonable and he’s giving me a thousand dollars on my old Datsun and that seems fair.”

  To Chee the thousand for the Datsun seemed enough more than fair to arouse suspicion. Janet’s Datsun was a junker. But it was clear that Janet was not going to be receptive to discouraging words. She described the Buick as “absolutely beautiful.” As she described it, the lawyer in Janet Pete fell away. The girl emerged through the delight and enthusiasm, and Janet Pete became absolutely beautiful herself.

  “It has the prettiest blue plush upholstery. Lovely color. Dark blue outside with a real delicate pinstripe down the side, and the chrome is just right.” She looked slightly guilty at this. “I don’t usually like chrome,” she said. “But this…” She performed a gesture with shoulder and face that depreciated this lapse from taste. “…But this…well, I just love it.”

  She paused, examining Chee and transforming herself from girl to lawyer. “I thought maybe you would check it out for me. You drive all the time and you know all about mechanical things. If you don’t mind doing it, and there’s something seriously wrong with the engine, or something like that, then I could…”

  She had left the awful statement unfinished. And Chee had accepted the keys and said sure, he’d be glad to do it. Which wasn’t exactly the case. If there was something seriously wrong with the engine, telling her about it wasn’t going to make him popular with Janet Pete. And Chee wanted to be popular. He wondered about her. He wondered about a woman lawyer. To be more precise, he wondered if Janet Pete, or any woman, could fill the gap Mary Landon seemed to be leaving in his life.

  That was Friday evening. Saturday morning he drove the Buick down to Bernie Tso’s garage and put it on the rack. Bernie was not impressed.

  “Fourteen thousand miles, my ass,” Bernie said. “Look at the tread on those tires. And here.” Bernie rattled the universal joint. “Arizona don’t have a law about running back the odometer, but New Mexico does,” he said. “And she got this junker over in New Mexico. I’d say they fudged the first number a little. Turned her back from forty-four thousand, or maybe seventy-four.”

  He finished his inspection of the running gear and lowered the hoist. “Steering’s slack, too,” he said. “Want me to pull the head and take a look there?”

  “Maybe later,” Chee said. “I’ll take it out and see what I can find and then I’ll let her decide if she wants to spend any money on it.”

  And so he had driven Janet Pete’s blue Buick out Highway 550 toward Farmington, glumly noting its deficiencies. Slow response to the gas pedal. Probably easy to fix with an adjustment. Tendency to choke on acceleration. Also fixable. Tendency to steer to the right on braking. Suspension far too soft for Chee, who was conditioned to the cast-iron springing of police cars and pickup trucks. Maybe she liked soft suspension, but this one was also uneven—suggesting a bad shock absorber. And, as Bernie had mentioned, slack steering.

  He was measuring this slack, swaying down the Farmington-bound lanes of 550, when he saw the Backhoe Bandit. And it was the slack steering, eventually, that did him in.

  He noticed the off-color fender first. He noticed that the car approaching him, Shiprock-bound, was a blue Plymouth sedan of about 1970 vintage. As it passed, he registered the patches of gray-white primer paint on its door. He got only a glimpse of the profile of the driver—youngish, long blond hair emerging from under a dark billed cap.

  Chee didn’t give it a thought. He did a U-turn across the bumpy divider and followed the Plymouth.

  He was wearing his off-duty work clothes—greasy jeans and a Coors T-shirt with a torn armpit. His pistol was locked securely in the table beside the cot in his trailer at Shiprock. No radio in the Buick, of course. And it was no chase car. He would simply tag along, determine where the Backhoe Bandit was going, take whatever opportunity presented itself. The Plymouth was in no particular hurry. It did a left turn off 550 on the access road to the village of Kirtland. It crossed the San Juan bridge, did another turn onto a dirt road, and made the long climb up the mesa toward the Navajo Mine and the Four Corners Power Plant. Chee had fallen a quarter-mile back, partly to avoid eating the Plymouth’s dust and partly to avoid arousing suspicion. But by the time he reached the escarpment the Backhoe Bandit seemed to have sensed he was being followed. He did another turn onto a poorly graded dirt road across the sagebrush, driving much faster now and producing a rooster tail of dust. Chee followed, pushing the Buick, sending it bouncing and lurching over the humps, fighting the steering where the road was rutted. Through the dust he became belatedly aware the Plymouth had made another turn—a hard right. Chee braked, skidded, corrected the skid, collected the slack in the steering, and made the turn. He was a little late.

  Oops! Right wheel onto the rocky track. Left wheel in the sagebrush. Chee bounced painfully against the Buick’s blue plush roof, bounced again, saw through the dust the rocks he should have been avoiding, frantically spun the slack steering wheel, felt the impact, felt something go in the front end, and then simply slid along—his hat jammed low onto his forehead by its kiss with the ceiling.

  Janet Pete’s beautiful blue Buick slid sideways, plowing a sedan-sized gash through the sage. It stopped in a cloud of dirt. Chee climbed out.

  It looked bad, but not as bad as it might have been. The left front wheel was horizontal, the tie-rod that held it broken. Not as bad as a broken axle. The rest of the damage was, to Chee’s thinking, superficial. Just scrapes, dents, and scratches. Chee found the chrome strip that Janet Pete had so admired about fifteen yards back in the brush, peeled off by a limb. He laid it carefully on the backseat. The plume of dust produced by the Plymouth was receding over the rim of the mesa. Chee watched it, thinking about his immediate problem—getting a tow truck out here to haul in the Buick. Thinking about the five or six miles he would have to walk to get to a telephone, thinking about the seven or eight hundred dollars it was going to cost to patch up the damaged Buick. Thinking about such things was far more pleasant than considering his secondary problem, which was how to break the news to Janet Pete.

  “Absolutely beautiful,” Janet Pete had said. “I fell in love with it,” she’d said. “Just what I’d always wanted.” But he would think about that later. He was staring into the diminishing haze of dust, but his vision was turned inward—imprinting the Backhoe Bandit in his memory. The profile, the suggestion of pockmarks on the jaw, the hair, the cap. This had become a matter of pride. He would find the man again, sooner or later.

  By midafternoon, with the Buick back at Bernie Tso’s garage, it seemed it would be sooner. Tso knew the Plymouth. Had, in fact, once towed it in. And he knew a little about the Backhoe Bandit.

  “Everything that goes around comes
around,” Chee said, happily. “Everything balances out.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Tso said. “What’s it going to cost you to balance out this Buick?”

  “I mean catching the son of a bitch,” Chee said. “At least I’m going to be able to do that. Lay that on the captain’s desk.”

  “Maybe your girlfriend can take it back to the dealer,” Tso said. “Tell ’em she doesn’t like the way that front wheel looks.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” Chee said. “She’s a lawyer with DNA. Tribal legal services. I ran into her last summer.” Chee described how he had picked up a man who came to be Janet Pete’s client, and had tried to have him kept in the Farmington jail until he had a chance to talk to him, and how sore Pete had been about it.

  “Tough as nails,” Chee said. “Not my type. Not unless I kill somebody and need a lawyer.”

  “I don’t see how you’re going to catch him with what little I know about him,” Tso said. “Not even his name. All I remember is he works out in the Blanco gas field the other side of Farmington. Or said he did.”

  “And that you pulled him in when he had transmission troubles. And he paid you with two hundred-dollar bills. And he told you when you got it fixed to leave it at Slick Nakai’s revival tent.”

  “Well, yeah,” Tso said.

  “And he said you could leave the change with Slick ’cause he saw Slick pretty often.”

  And now it was Saturday night. Slick Nakai’s True Gospel had long since left the place near the Hogback where Tso had gone to tow in the Plymouth. But it was easy enough to locate by asking around. Nakai had loaded his tent, and his portable electric organ, and his sound system into his four-wheel trailer and headed southeast. He had left behind fliers tacked to telephone poles and Scotch-taped to store windows announcing that all hungering for the Word of the Lord could find him between Nageezi and the Dzilith-Na-O-Dith-Hie School.

  FOUR

  FULL DARKNESS CAME LATE on this dry autumn Saturday. The sun was far below the western horizon but a layer of high, thin cirrus clouds still received the slanting light and reflected it, red now, down upon the ocean of sagebrush north of Nageezi Trading Post. It tinted the patched canvas of Slick Nakai’s revival tent from faded tan to a doubtful rose and the complexion of Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn from dark brown to dark red.