The Sinister Pig - 15 by Tony Hillerman Page A

dry. We’re going to try to fix that.”
    “Where are they?” Bernie said. “Oh, I see them now. Wow. Bigger than I expected. Aren’t they a kind of antelope?”
    [56] “African antelope,” O’day said. “One of Tuttle’s hunting buddies shot one out here last spring. Weighed over four hundred pounds.”
    Bernie finished a cursory check of the tools on the trailer’s racks, the welding masks, propane tanks, compressor engine, and a lot of large machinery far beyond her comprehension. She nodded to Gonzales. “Thank you. I don’t often get a chance to meet colonels.”
    Gonzales looked slightly abashed. “Retired,” he said. “And from one of the Mexican army’s less noted reserve regiments.”
    O’day was grinning at her. “That about do it?”
    “I think so,” she said. “What’s the best way from here to get to ...” Bernie paused, visualizing her map, looking for a place that should be fairly nearby and also on a regular marked road that actually went somewhere. “To get to Hatchita.”
    “First I got to let you back through the gate. From there you—hell, I’ll show you when we get there.”
    “First I want to get a picture of those oryx,” Bernie said. She reached into her truck and extracted the camera. “No harm shooting them with a camera is there?”
    O’day stared out at the animals, still waiting on the hillside. “Kinda far away,” he said. “They’ll just be specks.”
    “I’ve got a telescopic lens,” she said, tapping it, and got into her truck. “But I’ll drive a little ways up the hill there to get a better shot.”
    “Well, now,” he said, looking doubtful.
    “Just a few hundred yards,” Bernie said, starting the engine. “I want to get where I won’t have all this clutter in the picture. Make it look like I shot it in the wilds of Africa.”
    [57] That seemed to satisfy O’day, but when she stopped a quarter mile up the hill he was still watching her. She focused on the largest oryx, which also seemed to be staring at her. Then she got another shot of Gonzales, also staring, and of his van, the shack, and the equipment around it. Why waste those last exposures on a thirty-six-frame roll?
    O’day pointed her way through what he called “Hatchet Gap,” which led her to a road that actually had been graded and graveled, and on to County Road 9, and thence to Hatchita and the turn south toward Interstate Highway 10 and Eleanda’s little house in Rodeo. Straight road now, no traffic. She extracted Jim Chee’s letter from her jacket pocket. She spread it on the steering wheel and zipped through the introductory paragraphs to the terminal portion.
     
    We now have a case that would interest you. It’s a very professional-looking homicide with the victim shot once in the back from a distance. Well-dressed man and I don’t mean by Farmington standards. Tailored shirt, even. Osborne said even the shoes were custom made. He was found out in the Checkboard Rez just south of Jicarilla Apache land. He was in an El Paso rent-a-car parked on the track leading to one of those Giant Oil pump stations and there was a bunch of stuff about welding and pipeline fixing, etc., in the car which didn’t seem to fit with the way he was dressed. No identification on him, but the car rental papers showed it had been signed to a welding/metal [58]construction company down in Mexico. Now Osborne tells me the case has all of a sudden been taken away from the regional FBI, and he thinks it’s being run right out of Washington.
    I’m hoping it will involve Customs violations in some way or another and maybe that would give me an excuse to get down there and look into it, and invite you out to dinner.
    Sincerely,
    Jim
     
    Bernie made a face, refolded the letter back into her pocket.
    “And sincerely to you, too, Sergeant Chee,” she said to the windshield, feeling sour, dusty, and exhausted. But by the time she saw the little cluster of buildings that formed Rodeo, she was thinking