29

FINALLY COLTON WOLF was ready. He’d had both a CB radio and a radiotelephone installed in the cab of the pickup. He had driven up an arroyo east of the Sandia Mountains and refreshed his marksmanship with both his rifle and his.22 caliber pistol. The rifle was an expensive.30 caliber Ruger equipped with a scope. He’d fired off half the shells from a 100-round carton, adjusting the open sights for ranges up to 250 yards and the scope up to 800. Then he’d established with a telephone call to the hospital that Western Union couldn’t deliver a telegram to Jim Chee because Jim Chee had checked out. That confirmed what Colton had expected. Next he called the city desk at the Albuquerque Journal, identified himself as a professor at the university, and got permission to do some research in the newspaper’s library. An hour of reading through clippings of crime reports provided him with the names of FBI agents and sheriff’s officers who worked on or around the Navajo reservation. He jotted the names and pertinent information into his notebook and then asked if there was a file on B. J. Vines. There was. The oldest clipping reported a transfer of uranium leases from Vines to a consortium of mining companies headed by Kennecott Copper and Kerrmac Nuclear Fuels. Another, a wire service story originating in New York, reported that Vines had won the Weatherby Trophy, the world championship of big-game hunting. The only substantial story was a feature, with photographs, of the construction of Vines’ home on the slope of Mount Taylor. The residence was described as “probably the most expensive ever built in New Mexico.” The man whose name Colton had found in the box he’d been hired to recover was obviously rich enough to pay the cost of recovering it. There was a good chance, then, that Vines was the client. Not a certainty, because someone else seemed to have wanted the box. But Vines seemed most likely. Colton added to his notes a description of the house and its location. If all else failed, that might be useful.

Colton’s last stop was at the municipal library, where he checked through the file of telephone books and noted the numbers he might need. And then he drove westward from Albuquerque, climbing out of the Rio Grande valley, crossing the Rio Puerco breaks, and rolling at a steady fifty-five miles an hour across the empty mesa-butte landscape of west central New Mexico. As he drove, he tested his radio reception on the federal and law-enforcement channels. Reception was excellent. The technique and terminology of the radio dispatchers was no different from what he’d heard in other states. Then he tested the telephone connection by calling the U.S. Weather Service for the forecast. For the west central plateau of New Mexico, the forecast was for increasing afternoon cloudiness, periodic gusty winds, and colder temperatures through the afternoon, with a 60 percent chance of snow before midnight. The green interstate information sign told Colton that the Grants interchange was ahead. To his right, Mount Taylor rose against an unnaturally blue sky, its highest slopes white with snowbanks. He let the camper roll to a stop on the shoulder of the highway, picked up the phone, checked his notebook for the names he wanted, and placed a call to the Navajo Tribal Police subagency office at Crownpoint.

The voice that answered was a woman’s.

“This is the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Colton said, “Albuquerque. Agent Martin. Is Captain Largo there?”

“He works out of Tuba City,” the voice said. “That number…”

“I know that,” Colton said, “but Largo told me he might stop in there today. How about Jim Chee, then?”

“Chee’s not here, either,” the voice said. “He’s taking some time off.”

“How’s he feeling? Hope those ribs are healing up.”

“Okay, I guess.”

“I was calling about Chee,” Colton said. “We got some things we want him to look at. About that shooting. How can I get hold of him?”

“Just a minute,” the voice said. There was a pause.

Colton waited. This was the crucial moment. He would allow the delay to stretch four minutes. More than that would risk a successful trace. He couldn’t chance the police learning that this was a radiotelephone call. The second hand on his watch dial swept into the second minute.

“We’ll have to get him on the radio.” It was a man’s voice now. “What’s the message?”

“Tell him Martin has some information for him, and I need to show him some pictures. Tell him I’m coming out to the reservation and have him call me on my car telephone.” He provided a wrong number that sounded reasonable. “Is he near a telephone?”

“I doubt it,” the voice said.

“Look,” Colton said. “This is urgent. See if you can find him, and if he’s a long ways from a telephone, can I get you to call me back and let me know how long it will be?”

“Sure,” the voice said.

“Okay. Thanks,” Colton said. He hung up, switched on the radio receiver, and pulled the truck back onto Interstate 25. He hadn’t gone a mile before he monitored the first call from the Crownpoint dispatcher trying to reach Jimmy Chee.

Colton drove steadily westward, past Grants, past the uranium-processing mills of Ambrosia Lakes, into the rougher country which climbed toward the Continental Divide. Crownpoint was trying to reach Chee at ten-minute intervals. At the Thoreau interchange, Colton pulled off the highway and parked. It was here he had decided to wait. He had never thought there was a serious chance that Chee would run far after the fiasco in the hospital. There was no need to run. Where better to hide an Indian than on an Indian reservation?

He sat with his knees propped against the dash and put together a sandwich of the materials he had brought from the trailer. As always, he ate slowly. The mountain was miles to the east now, but it still dominated the landscape, cold and ominous. When this was over, when he had caught Jim Chee and killed him, and killed the woman; when his tracks were erased and he was once again secure, then he would find a better way to trace his mother. Perhaps a hypnotist could help him remember something he had forgotten. Something useful. There was that old woman in one of his earliest memories. She had put him on her lap and her breath had smelled of tobacco. He had always guessed she might be a grandmother. If he could remember that – or even the place where they had lived when he was very small – it might be helpful. He could remember so little of that. Only a sense of days of cold fog, days of rain, days in an upstairs apartment with his meals left in a refrigerator, his mother coming home in the mornings, his mother’s hair damp against his face, his mother’s hands cold against his skin. There were men then, too, but no particular man he could remember.

He was staring outward at the blank blue sky, but his thoughts were on that room. He could remember the cracks in the gray linoleum. He’d had two marbles then and the marbles would chase one another down the cracks. He could remember playing that game endlessly, day after day, and the grimy windows, but not the name of the town. Surely he had heard it. Surely, even at four or five, it had meant something to him. His mother had not talked to him often. She wouldn’t have been likely to tell a child they were living in Seattle, or Portland, or wherever it was. But he must have heard it. He would find himself a hypnotist and maybe then he could remember something. Colton was aware that things were wrong with his memory. Gaps in it. He ran his thumb down his sweater, feeling the bump under the skin where the rib had healed crookedly. He could remember when he didn’t have the bump – when they lived in San Diego. He could remember having it, already healed, in Bakersfield. But he couldn’t remember the beating that produced it. It was the same with the ridge of thick white scar tissue under the hair above his left ear. That also had grown from some blank spot in his childhood. The last time he had tried to remember about that was in Taylorville, but trying had made him sick and he had stopped.