Free A Thief of Time by Tony Hillerman Page A

had three trucks out at the moment with dual rear wheels. Two had been recently reshod with Daytons. One was rented to a Farmington furniture company. The other, equipped with a power winch, was rented to Joe B. Nails, P.O. Box 770, Aztec, using a MasterCard.
    Farmington police had a record on Nails. One driving while intoxicated. It was enough to provide an employer’s name. Wellserve, Inc., a contractor maintaining the Gasco collection system. But Wellserve was a former employer. Nails had quit in August.
    Chee learned all of this good news secondhand. He’d spent the morning hanging around Red Rock, worrying about what he’d tell Janet Pete when she got back from Phoenix, and waiting for a witness he was supposed to deliver to the FBI office in Farmington. With that done two hours behind schedule, he had stopped at the Shiprock headquarters and got the first half of the news about the trailer. He’d spent the afternoon hunting around Teec Nos Pos for a fellow who’d broken his brother-in-law’s leg. No luck on that. When he pulled back into Shiprock to knock off for the day, he ran into Benally going off shift.
    â€œI guess we got your Backhoe Bandit,” Benally said. And he filled Chee in on the rest of it. “U-Haul calls us when he checks the truck in.”
    That struck Chee as stupid. “You think he’ll have the backhoe in it when he returns it?” Chee said. “Otherwise, no proof of anything. What you charge him with?”
    Benally had thought of that and so had Captain Largo.
    â€œWe bring him in. We tell him we have witnesses who saw him taking the thing out, and we can connect it to the truck he rented, and if he’ll cooperate and tell us where it is so we can recover it, and snitch on his buddy, then we go light on him.” Benally shrugged, not thinking it would work either. “Better than nothing,” he added. “Anyway, the call’s out on the U-Haul truck. Maybe we catch him with the backhoe in it.”
    â€œI doubt it,” Chee said.
    Benally agreed. He grinned. “The best plan would have been for you to have grabbed him when he was driving out of the yard with it.”
    Chee called Pete’s office from the station phone. He’d break it by degrees. Tell her first that a lot of things were wrong with the Buick, sort of slip into the part about tearing it up. But Miss Pete wasn’t in, wasn’t back from Phoenix, had called in and said she’d be held over for a day.
    Wonderful. Chee felt immense relief. He put the Buick out of his mind. He thought about the Backhoe Bandit, who was going to get away with it. He thought about what the preacher had told him Saturday night.
    The preacher said he didn’t know the name of the man who owned the patched-up car. He thought he’d heard him called Jody, or maybe Joey. He thought the man worked in the Blanco field—maybe for Southern Union Gas, but maybe not. The man sometimes brought him a pot which the preacher said he sometimes bought. The last time he saw him, the man had asked if the preacher would buy a whole bunch of pots if the man could get them. “And I told him maybe I could and maybe I couldn’t. It would depend on whether I had any money.”
    â€œSo maybe he’ll come back again and maybe he won’t.”
    â€œI think he’ll be back,” the preacher had said. “I told him if I couldn’t handle it, I knew somebody who could.” And he told Chee about the woman anthropologist, and that led him to Lieutenant Leaphorn. The preacher was a talkative man.
    Chee sat now in his pickup truck beside the willows shading the police parking lot. He felt relief on one hand, pressure on the other. The dreaded meeting with Janet Pete was off, at least until tomorrow. But when it came, he wanted to conclude his story by telling Pete how he had nailed the man to blame for all this. It didn’t seem likely that was going to happen.