Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 05] by The Dark Wind (v1.1) [html]

clatter of sound and flew back up the arroyo to the trees they had been avoiding. Chee had expected them to do exactly that.

Chapter Eight
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    T he only reasons Jimmy Chee would have admitted for climbing down into Wepo Wash was to give himself a chance to identify—and perhaps even confront—whoever was watching him. He'd give the watcher time to follow. Then he would drop out of sight—probably by moving into a side arroyo somewhere up the wash. Once Chee was out of sight, the watcher would have to make a decision: to follow or not. However he made it, Chee would be able to reverse the roles. He'd become the stalker.
    That was the plan. But now he was in the wash, and just a hundred yards up the hard-packed sandy bottom from where he stood, the sun glinted from the remains of the aircraft. The wreckage was fbi and dea business. A Navajo Tribal Policeman would not be welcome here without a specific invitation. But Chee was curious. And to his watcher, a visit to the wreckage would seem a logical reason for this walk.
    The ground around the site was thoroughly trampled now and the plane itself had been ransacked. Wing and stabilizer panels had been peeled open, a gas tank removed, and holes punched in the thin aluminum skin of the rudder, in what must have been a search for the cargo it had carried. Chee stared up the wash, up the plane's landing path, frowning. As he remembered, it had struck an upthrust of basalt which jutted from the floor of the wash. The wash had flowed around the extrusion on both sides, eroding the earth and leaving a black stone island in a sea of sand. If there wasn't room to land up-wash from this wall of stone, and there seemed to be plenty of space, there was obviously room enough to miss it to the right or left. Why hadn't the pilot avoided it? Surely he hadn't simply landed blindly in the dark. Chee walked upwash, out of the trampled area. He kept his eyes on the sand, looking for the answer. The watcher could wait.
    A little more than an hour later, he heard the sound of a car engine. By then he knew why the plane had crashed. But he had new questions.
    The car was a dark-blue Ford Bronco. It pulled to a stop beside the wreckage. Two persons emerged. A man and a woman. They stood a moment, looking upwash toward Chee, and then walked to the aircraft. Chee walked toward them. The man was tall, hatless, gray-haired, wearing jeans and a white shirt. The woman was hatless, too. She was rather small, with short dark hair that curled around her face. Not fbi . Probably not dea , although anybody could be dea . They stood beside the wreckage, looking at the plane but waiting for him. Chee saw the man was older than he had looked from a distance—perhaps in his early fifties. One of those men who take care of themselves, join racquet clubs, jog, lift weights. His face was long, with deep lines along the nose, and eyes which, because of large black pupils, looked somewhat moist and luminous. The woman glanced at Chee and then stared at the wreckage. Her oval face, drained of color, looked shocked. She was in her fifties, Chee guessed, but at the moment she looked as old as time. Something about her tugged at Chee's memory. The man's expression was defensive, the look of someone caught trespassing, who expects to be asked who he is and what he's doing. Chee nodded to him.
    "We came out to see the aircraft," the man said. "I was his attorney and this is Gail Pauling."
    "Jim Chee," Chee said. He shook the man's hand and nodded to the woman.
    "Jim Chee," the woman said. "You're the one who found my brother."
    Chee knew now what she reminded him of. Her brother was the pilot. "I don't think he had any suffering," Chee said. "It must have happened in an instant. Too quick to know what happened."
    "And what did happen?" Miss Pauling asked. She gestured toward the outcrop. "I can't believe he would just fly right into this."
    "He didn't, exactly," Chee said. "His wheels touched down