The Dark Wind by Tony Hillerman

Author:Tony Hillerman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Police - Southwestern States, Police Procedural, Police, Suspense, Mystery & Detective, Horror tales, Navaho Indians, Navajo Indians, Political, Fiction, Chee, Mystery fiction, Horror stories, New, Southwestern States, General, Cultural Heritage, Jim (Fictitious character), Southwest
ISBN: 9780061000034
Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
Published: 1990-05-15T06:29:14+00:00

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CHEE TOOK THE ROUNDABOUT WAY HOME—circling north through Santa Fe and Chama instead of southward down the Rio Grande valley through Albuquerque. He took the northern route because it led through beautiful country. He planned to play the tapes he had made of Frank Sam Nakai singing the Night Chant and thereby memorize another section of that complicated eight-day ritual. Beauty helped put him in the mood for the sort of concentration required. Now it didn’t work. His mind kept turning to the distraction of unresolved questions. Ironfingers? “Too damn clever,” Archer had called him, but not too smart to give stolen jewelry to a girl. Had Johnson, as it seemed, deliberately set up Thomas Rodney West for a prison yard killing? And if he had, why? Who had taken the body of Palanzer from the carryall? And why had the body been left there, in its cocoon of Lysol mist, in the first place? The moon rose over the jagged ridge of the Sangre de Cristo range as he drove up the Chama valley. It hung in the clear, dark sky like a great luminous rock, flooding the landscape with light. When he reached Abiquiu village, he pulled off at the Standard station, bought gas, and used the pay phone. He called Cowboy Dashee’s home number. The phone rang six times before Cowboy answered. Dashee had been asleep.

“I didn’t think bachelors went to bed so early,” Chee said. “Sorry about that. But I need to know something. Did they find the dope?”

“Hell,” Dashee said. “We didn’t find nothing. That’s why I’m trying to get some sleep. The sheriff wanted us out there at daylight. Everybody figured they’d hauled that stuff up the arroyo in that carryall and then hid it someplace around there. If they did, we sure as hell couldn’t find it.”

“Does anybody really know what you’re looking for?” Chee asked. “Any idea how big it is, or what it weighs, or how big a hole it would take to bury it?”

“Seem to,” Cowboy said. “They were talking about a hundred pounds or so and something as bulky as maybe three forty-pound sacks of flour. Or maybe a bunch of smaller packages.”

“So they do know what they’re after,” Chee said. “The DEA was there?”

“Johnson was. And a couple of FBI agents from Flagstaff.”

“And you didn’t find anything interesting? No dope, no machine guns, no tape-recorded messages on how to ransom the cargo, no dead bodies, no maps. Absolutely nothing?”

“Found a few tracks,” Cowboy said. “Nothing useful. There just flat wasn’t any big cache of dope hidden up there. If they hauled it up there in that GMC in the first place, then they just hauled it off again, and we didn’t see any sign of that. Wouldn’t make sense anyway. Think about it. No sense to it.”

Chee did think about it. He thought about it intermittently all the way north to Chama and then on the long westward drive across the sprawling Jicarilla Apache reservation. As Cowboy said, there was no sense to it.

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