Free The Sinister Pig - 15 by Tony Hillerman Page B

He enjoys helping folks and it pays off in their cooperation.”
    Which was true. Ed Henry liked Bernadette Manuelito from the very first, an intelligent, levelheaded young woman a bit like his own daughter. She had a lot to learn about border patrolling, but she would learn fast, being energetic and eager. Maybe a wee bit too eager, Ed Henry was thinking. His bedside telephone had rung just a few minutes after sevena.m., which would be just a little after nine in Washington, or maybe New York. It was The Man, and The Man had sounded grim.
    “Henry,” he said, “why was one of your people out on the Tuttle Ranch?”
    “What?” Henry had said, trying to get himself fully awake, trying to figure out what this was about. “I didn’t send an agent out there.”
    “Woman cop with Border Patrol credentials. Woman named Manuelito. She was following Gonzales and she took a bunch of pictures. Tell me why.”
    All Henry could tell The Man was that Bernie was a new recruit in the Shadow Wolf tracking unit and he’d sent her into the boot heel territory to try her hand at picking up some trails the illegals had been using. That did not please The Man.
    [78] “I’ll call you back in three hours at your office number. I want you to tell me then why she was following Gonzales and why she was taking pictures and what her connections are. And get those pictures and see to it that they get to me.”
    “I can tell you she’s a Navajo. Had been with the Navajo Tribal Police and—” Henry stopped. The line was dead.
    “That son of a bitch,” Henry said. He sat on his bed, floor cool under his bare feet, wondering just what The Man looked like. He knew him only by his voice, and heard that rarely since his connection in this sideline job was the very polite fellow from Juarez who called himself Carlos Delo and who had showed Henry how he could augment his income on the border as efficiently as he had in college. Delo seemed to get his instructions from the East Coast voice, passed the word along when a favor was needed from Henry, and arranged deposits in an El Paso bank account later.
    Henry had heard the voice only three times before, always at moments of some sort of crisis, but he recognized it instantly: the effete East Coast intellectual sound—the Kennedy broad “a,” the softness at the wrong places. Henry had pictured him as having a sort of long, narrow, British royalty face, thin lips, neatly coifed white hair. A bank official, probably, with a limo waiting for him about forty floors below, calling some low-level flunkey in New Mexico just to make sure a loan he’d signed off on was being protected. Well—
    The telephone rang. Henry looked at it, grimaced, picked it up, and said: “Yes.”
    “You’re going to get a call from The Man,” this voice [79] said. It was the clipped, precise sound of Charley Delo. “He is pissed off.”
    “What’s going on?”
    “Henry, you know they don’t tell me, and I don’t ask ’em. They tell me what to do, and I do it. And if I need some help from you, I tell you what I need. That’s how we make a living.”
    “Who is that arrogant son of a bitch? I see him as a very important loan officer in a very lofty bank and he’s overseeing an export-import business that wouldn’t have Customs Service approval.”
    “I don’t know, and you don’t want to know. All I know is he doesn’t want Customs cops messing around out there around the Brockman Hills. He wants you to make sure they won’t.”
    “I told him I didn’t send anyone out there.”
    “You need to get hold of that woman Customs Officer and find out what the hell she was doing, and get those pictures to me. Get ’em to the bank in Juarez and leave them in our safety deposit box. He also wants a picture of that woman cop.”
    Henry held the telephone away from his ear and rubbed his forehead. “Hey,” the voice was saying. “Hey. You there.”
    “Yeah,” Henry said.
    “You hear what I