Hunting badger by Tony Hillerman

Author:Tony Hillerman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780060547714
Publisher: New York : PerfectBound, 2003.
Published: 2010-10-13T07:00:00+00:00

"It wasn't that," Leaphorn said, his face a little flushed. "It was just that a lot of times I'd have access to information you didn't have."

"Well, anyway, I didn't mention a girlie magazine in a door pocket, and some receipts for gasoline purchases, a broken radio in the truck bed, an oil-wipe rag and an empty Dr Pepper can."

Leaphorn thought, said, "Tell me about the radio."

"The radio? Dashee said it wouldn't play. It looked new. Looked expensive. But it didn't work. He figured the battery must be dead."

Leaphorn thought again. "Seems funny they'd go off and leave something like that. They must have brought it along for a reason. Probably wanted to use it to keep track of what the cops were doing. Did it have a scanner, so they could monitor police radio traffic?"

"Damn," Chee said. "Dashee didn't say, and I didn't think to ask him."

Leaphorn glanced at Professor Bourebonette, looking apologetic.

"Go ahead," she said. "I always wondered how you guys do your work."

"Not in a restaurant usually," Leaphorn said. "But I wish I had a map."

"Lieutenant," Chee said, reaching for his jacket pocket, "can you imagine me coming in here to talk to you and not bringing a map?"

The waitress arrived while Leaphorn was spreading the map over the tablecloth. She made a patient face, took their orders and went away.

"OK," Leaphorn said. He drew a small, precise X. "Here we have Jorie's place. Now, where did the men get out of the pickup?"

"I'd say right here," Chee said, and indicated the spot with a tine of his fork.

"Right beside that unimproved road?"

"No. Several hundred yards down a slope. Toward that Gothic Creek drainage."

The map they were using was THE MAP, produced years ago by the Automobile Club of Southern California, adopted by the American Automobile Association as its "Guide to Indian Country" and meticulously revised and modified year by year as bankruptcy forced yet another trading post to close, dirt roads became paved, flash floods converted "unimproved" routes to "impassable," and so forth. Leaphorn refolded it now to the mileage scale, transferred that to the margin of his paper napkin and applied that to measure the spaces between X's.

"About twenty miles as the crow flies," Leaphorn said. "Make it thirty on foot because you have to detour around canyons."

"It seemed to me an awful long way to walk if you don't have to," Chee said. "And then there's more questions."

"I think I have the answer to one of them," Leaphorn said. "If you want to believe it."

"It's really a sort of bundle of questions," Chee said. "Jorie went home. So I guess we can presume he was sure the cops wouldn't be coming after him. Didn't have him identified. So forth. So how was he identified? And how did he know he'd been identified? And why didn't the other two members of the crew behave in the same way? Why didn't they go home? And-and so forth."

Leaphorn had extracted a folded paper from his jacket pocket. He opened it, glanced at it.

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