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If the new sheriff’s deputy had not warned him of the corporate mining action in Dry Gulch Canyon, Wild Eagle might have minded his own business and let things proceed on their own. Never mind the fact that the exploratory digging had started near the place where the detective had buried his mentor, the spirit walker Two Feathers; never mind the fact that the Navajo entrepreneur who contrived to steal the old Indian’s legacy had been pulled apart by the Mogollon Man; and never mind the fact that it was so blistering hot that the desert around his RV seemed a mirage. So Scout, as he was known by white men, got off his ass and climbed into his truck to take a look for himself.
Off the main highway and raising dust as he drove east toward an overlook he knew along the Mogollon Range, Wild Eagle scanned the horizon for signs of a big mining operation in its early stages. He was smiling when he saw the mountain goats scamper along the skyline. He slowed as he approached the peak and let his vehicle coast to the shelter of a rock outcrop. From his glove compartment, he took his binoculars. He climbed the rocks and looked through the clear air at the three vehicles with red and yellow Navajo Explorations logos. Five men were milling around while two others filled burlap bags with samples.
If this is a mining expedition, it is in its earliest stages, he thought. High overhead, a pair of turkey buzzards wheeled. A cactus wren scurried nearby, looking for lizards, probably. Wild Eagle kept his glasses pointed toward the men as they worked. Two Feathers, he thought, the white men love gold. Your murder was part of their complex plan to own your mineral wealth, but that was our tribe’s wealth. Besides, you never divulged the secret of its hiding place. It seems these Navajos think that your choice of a burial place was a sign. I know it was a sign, but not of wealth. Where are you now, old man? Maybe a little hell’s bells seed and nightfall will help us discuss that. He breathed in the thin, hot air. Then he rose and dusted off his pants and shirt as he leapt down the outcrop to his truck.
As he descended the route he had taken across the bare desert, a commercial helicopter flew overhead. It had the markings of Navajo Explorations. It hovered near his truck like an angry golden wasp. To make its point clear, a rifleman aimed from an opening and fired five shots, whose presence was registered by wisps of sand rising around the truck.
Wild Eagle continued driving unperturbed. By the time he had reached the highway, the helo had returned to its base. The deputy was waiting for him to return to his RV.
“Detective, what about ‘Do not investigate!’ do you not understand?”
“Hello again. I just drove out to survey the plot where I buried my mentor Two Feathers.”
“Why would you want to do that? I mean, why now?”
“If you want the long story, we can have a coke in my backyard garden. The short answer is, ‘None of your goddamn business.’”
The deputy could not stay fixed on the gumshoe’s eyes. “Well, Wild Eagle, now you’ve been warned twice. There won’t be a third warning.” He strode to his car and climbed inside.
The detective saw him use his radio but could not hear the conversation. He waited until the lawman drove away before he went inside to pull a power drink from his fridge. He headed back to his garden to admire his manzanilla’s blossoms. Under the trellis sat Pedro Ortiz, an undocumented alien child who sometimes dropped by for a meal.
“Good morning, Detective.”
“Good morning, Pedro. Where are Pancho and the mule?”
“Not very funny, I think.”
“You’re right. I have two leftover tamales in my fridge. Do you want them warm or cold?”
“Cold is fine. I can’t afford to pay you for them.”
“Go help yourself. You know where you can find a plate and fork. Fetch a power drink like this one. You can watch me garden.”
The young man did not hesitate to make himself at home. The detective wondered whether the boy would ever be reunited with his parents, both of whom had been deported. The only advice they had for their only son was that he should stick to the reservations rather than test his luck in the general population. The immigration officers and the border patrol could send him deep into Mexico, where he would have to join a criminal gang to survive.
While Wild Eagle trimmed his plants, Pedro ate his brunch and watched him. When he had finished, the boy took his plate, fork, and plastic container to the kitchen. He returned to the backyard, prepared to talk.
“So tell me what is going right with the world, Pedro?”
“Nothing. But the word has gone out about mining work beginning soon near the Mogollon Range. More than minimum wage. No questions asked. Do you think I should sign up? It sounds like easy money. Do you think it is a trap?”
“Is the name of the firm doing the hiring Navajo Explorations?”
“Yes.”
“Then, yes. It is likely a trap—unless you’re Navajo. The last time I checked, you are not Navajo, are you?”
“No. As you have always taught me, if something seems too good to be true, it must be false.”
“The truth hurts, doesn’t it?”
“Do you think there is any money in keeping track of what Navajo Explorations is doing?”
“Hm. It would entail considerable risks on your part.”
The boy smiled broadly. “How much?”
“I will pay, depending on what you discover. Make sure you don’t come here with fleas.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Don’t get yourself followed to my RV, or you’ll be put under a big spotlight.”
“No comprendo.”
“You’ll be killed.” The detective made his face into a mask of pained concern.
“Sí. I have ways of keeping out of sight.”
The boy departed before Wild Eagle checked his Mason jar of seeds. Like a pharmacist, he counted out twelve peyote seeds, the perfect potency for his purposes, and folded them in a paper pouch that went into his red flannel shirt pocket.
That evening, after Wild Eagle had spent the remainder of his day doing his favorite thing—contemplation while keeping busy—he was putting his dinner dishes away when he heard a faint knock on his back door. There was Pedro with a black eye.
“Come on in, Pedro. What gave you that shiner?”
“May I please have something to eat? This time I’ll show how I earned it.”
The detective first made a cold compress with a towel and ice for the boy to apply to his eye. Then he made fried eggs and beans and sat Pedro at his two-person dining table with a power drink. “Don’t rush, but when you are ready, tell me your story.”
“You were right about the trap. Because of the wages, everyone wanting work showed up, many illegals like me among them. The Navajos were all hired immediately. The illegals were turned over to the sheriff and his deputy, who offered two choices—deportation, or another kind of work.” The boy shook his head.
“You are keeping me in suspense. What other kind of work?”
“In a word, trafficking. There were choices there, too—sex or drugs. Girls had no choice in that. Boys did have a choice, neither one good. I heard the whole deal before I and two others made a break for the desert. The other two were not as lucky as I was. I was only hit in the face and, for a moment, blacked out. That saved me. When I came to, I was not being watched, so I ran here. What do you think? Is that information worth my meal?”
“I’m going to do better than that.” Wild Eagle rose and fetched a roll of quarters from the top shelf of his cabinet. He doled out three dollars worth of quarters and watched Pedro slip them into his pants pocket.
“Thank you, but I’m afraid that I won’t be able to get any more information about Navajo Explorations for you. If I try, someone will recognize me and tell.”
“Did you learn what the job for the Navajos was going to be?”
“They said it was sand picking.”
“That is all?”
“Sí. All day, they were going to a place in the foothills to look for specks of gold.”
“Are you going to be all right tonight?”
“Sí. Thank you for dinner—and the twelve quarters. I’ll try to think of other things I can do for you.”
“Buenas noches, Pedro. Vaya con Dios.”
“Vaya con Dios, Detective.”
Wild Eagle was incensed about the trafficking business that the two law enforcers were doing. He had no sense of what the Navajos were up to, but he had a self-made appointment with Two Feathers, so he drove to the place in the Mogollon Range where they had become accustomed to meeting. He popped the twelve seeds and watched the clear skies explode with twinkling stars.
“Hello, Scout. You’ve been making all the right kinds of trouble again for the law. If you keep on doing that, you’ll get yourself killed.”
“You’re probably right, old man. What do you think of the sex and drug trafficking rings?”
“They are bad for everyone, but some get rich by the business. It’s more lucrative and quicker than sifting through ore looking for gold.”
“The Navajos think your burial place was a marker for where the gold is.”
The spirit of the old man laughed and then became serious. “Ignorant head-pounders! They’ll never find the gold. It takes too much patience, and you have to know what you are looking for.”
The detective and his mentor sat for a long while, each with his separate thoughts.
“I’m not sure what my next moves are going to be.”
“Don’t look at me. I’m not going to dictate what you should do. My advice is to let things come to you—like the boy.”
“Did you send him to me?”
“Did you want me to?”
The detective shook his head.
“The deputy will be turning those illegals over to the cartels before daylight right down below us. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of shooting broke out. Many will be killed. That is, unless ...”
The detective waited for the spirit to continue, but he only heard the flutter of a dwarf owl’s wings and the sound of two lines of traffic coming from the highway across the desert. Wild Eagle shook his head. He ran to his truck and grabbed his loaded rifle from its rack. He kept in motion until he had run halfway down the hillside where a giant rock stood like a sentinel.
“Hello, Detective.”
“Pedro?”
The boy whispered, “Sí. I expect you heard about the transfer to the traffickers. I also see that you came prepared to do something about it.”
Wild Eagle nodded. He could see in the starlight that the boy was smiling as if his prayer had been answered.
“All I have are these stones and this slingshot.”
The detective saw the round stones and the enormous weapon. “How good are you with that weapon?”
“We shall see. I can put a stone into a nest hole in a saguaro as far as the traffickers will be from us tonight.”
“When the shooting starts, I want you to lie flat behind this rock. Until then, you can shoot as you like.”
The approaching vehicles stopped within fifty feet of the rock where Scout and Pedro waited. The deputy unchained his vehicle and helped his passengers out one by one. He arranged them in two lines, one of boys and one of girls. The detective aimed his rifle at the man he assumed was the leader of the drug cartel. The deputy was counting in Spanish as he touched the head of each male he was selling. The Mexican trafficker was nodding and joking with his second-in-command.
Two boy prisoners seized their opportunity to run in opposite directions into the desert. The leader coolly drew a bead on one of them with his rifle, but a loud crack sounded, and the outlaw suddenly collapsed. As the other cartel representative crouched, he, too, grabbed at his head after a second crack sounded. He dropped on the desert floor.
The detective gave a thumbs up to Pedro, who was nodding and loading another stone into his slingshot. The deputy was examining the two bodies. He was about to herd his boys back into his vehicle when two things happened all at once. The boys who had already escaped yelled to their comrades to run in different directions, and the girls decided their time had come as well, so they screamed and ran as the sex traffickers climbed out of their vehicles to corral them. This, of course, made them perfect targets for Pedro’s stones. With two loud cracks, the sex traffickers lay dead. The girls did not stop running into the darkness.
Pedro kept his slingshot aimed at the deputy, who was holstering his gun and walking toward the traffickers’ vehicles. The detective held up his hand as a signal for Pedro to hold his fire. The deputy was not trying to figure out who had caused his good luck. Instead, he was going for the money the traffickers had brought for the exchange. He picked up the sacks of unmarked bills from each vehicle and placed them in his own. He looked around to find any of his victims, but finding none, he shrugged and got into his vehicle. He drove into the night as Scout and Pedro closed on the traffickers’ vehicles.
“Pedro, check out that other vehicle for food and water. I’ll check this one out.”
As they did this, the boys and girls who had fled gathered around them, saying they were hungry and thirsty.
Pedro told the detective, “We must feed them. Then we must take them somewhere safe. I know someone who might help. There is a sister in holy orders who has helped me.”
When all the victims had been fed, they climbed into the rear compartment of one of the traffickers’ vehicles. The detective drove them where Pedro directed. When he had dropped off the victims, and they had been accepted by the sister for the night, he and Pedro drove back to the desert so the truck would not be missing when the deputy arrived in the morning.
The man and the boy climbed back to the place where Wild Eagle’s truck was parked. There Pedro drew a pouch of marijuana from his pocket and offered some to the detective. They smoked together while they considered the night’s activities.
“Detective, this has been a good night’s work for both of us.”
“I agree. Your slingshot was an inspiration. We would have had a bloodbath if you had not used it exactly as you did.”
“Did I earn something by doing that?”
“How about the rest of the roll of quarters in my cabinet?”
“That is most generous. Gracias.”
When they had completed their smokes, it was almost sunrise. Wild Eagle drove them to his RV and paid Pedro what he owed him. Then the boy slipped into the night. The detective went to bed feeling better than he had done in many weeks.
The murders of the four traffickers were noted by the newspapers the next evening. More interest was stoked in the manner of their slayings than in the fact of their being traffickers. The story that four desperate, armed men had been killed by flying stones caught the imagination of the graphic artists. Images of David taking aim against Goliath was used as an editorial cartoon. The question was, “Who is David?” The newshounds’ interest was to find the hero so they could make him or her into a celebrity. Meanwhile, the sheriff and his deputy posted bills offering a ten-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the criminal who had killed four men in the desert.
Pedro had shown up for a late breakfast that morning with a request. “Sister Barbara wants to know what she should say when the authorities ask about the children she lodged and fed last night and this morning.”
As he served the boy huevos rancheros, he said, “Doesn’t she often give succor to innocent children on the run?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Why not tell her the truth? I found them in the desert and delivered them to her door in the middle of the night.”
“Okay, if you say so.”
“I do say so. I would have her omit any reference to you. Until this whole thing blows over, you must remain invisible. You should hide your slingshot and polished stone projectiles as well.”
“I will do as you say.”
The deputy, predictably, showed up at the detective’s RV the next morning with a chagrined look on his face. “Detective, I hate to interrupt your busy day again, but I have to ask a few questions about your activities during the night before last.”
“Fire away, Deputy!” he replied without looking up from his gardening.
“Where were you between eleven o’clock and midnight?”
“I was in the desert meditating with the soul of my departed mentor, Two Feathers. It was near the place where I gave his body the sky burial he had asked for.”
“Exactly what did you see during that interval?”
“Not much, Deputy, because it was way dark except for the starlight. I was pretty high on peyote seed.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know what might have happened in the murder of four men, not one hundred yards from where you were meditating?”
“Deputy, you might as well say where the money that those innocent victims brought with them happens to be now.”
“What are you insinuating?”
“I read through the news accounts of those murders, and a good investigative reporter could have driven a truck through the holes in the printed story.”
“So now you’re threatening me?”
“How can I be threatening you when all I want is a few simple answers? Of course, I could go to a reporter friend I know and suggest a few angles he might consider.”
“I’ll bite. What angles?”
“Since there were two traffickers with two vehicles, there must have been a lot of victims to barter for money that wasn’t found at the scene of the crimes. Furthermore, those victims must have stories to tell, though they were probably a mix of children and adults. I’d be asking them how they were caught, who transported them, and what they expected was going to happen to them once they were in the clutches of the traffickers.”
The deputy was turning beet red now.
The detective decided to turn the knife he had just figuratively inserted in the lawman’s gut. “It seems to me that you and the sheriff should be taking credit for taking down two trafficking bosses and impounding the cash while setting the victims free. I think you should take full credit for the killings done in self-defense while freeing the victims. That would make you heroes for the day. Who knows? You two might get national attention.”
“Am I to understand that you deny being the murderer of the four men?”
“Deputy, I am willing to be strapped to a lie detector to prove my innocence, but I’d only be willing to do that if you subjected yourself to the same form of interrogation. Naturally, I would contribute questions for you to answer under oath.”
“Just who do you think you are to suggest such a thing?”
“A citizen of the United States. A former veteran of the US Air Force. A licensed private investigator. Did you have any more questions for me today, Deputy? Oh, yes, if I catch wind of your giving grief to one Sister Barbara for accepting homeless children into her convent, I will visit you in ways you never dreamed of. That is not a threat, but a promise.”
The deputy stomped back to his car and spun his wheels, which screeched as he hit the road. The detective smiled when he saw the smiling face of Pedro, who had been hiding in the manzanilla the entire time.
“Oh, Detective, you are my role model. I will never forget you for this as long as I live.”
“Why don’t you go inside and get a power drink from the fridge? Bring two.”
That evening, Wild Eagle went back to see Two Feathers. Under the broad canopy of the western sky, the detective and his mentor chewed over events since their last meeting.
“It’s pretty smart how you boxed the deputy with your mix of logic and facts. You stuck your neck out with your willingness to be submitted to a polygraph, but you’ve done that before on many occasions.”
“It was a requirement of my military service.”
“I don’t trust mechanical devices to discern the truth.”
“Truth is not the issue.”
“As long as you remember that, you’ll be okay.”
“I’m worried about Pedro Ortiz.”
“He’s not a bad boy.”
“No, he’s not. I’d like to see that he has a good future.”
“Is that your concern?”
“You know the answer to that question.”
“He could be a superhero.”
“That’s what I am most concerned about.”
“Now I’m confused. What precisely do you want me to tell you?”
Wild Eagle shook his head. “I’d like to know if he’ll be okay.”
“Now you’re asking the kind of question I cannot answer.”
“You are a spirit walker. Aren’t you supposed to know such things?”
“It’s not in my manual. Even if I did know, and I’m not saying I do, I couldn’t tell you because you’re a mortal still. That’s too damn bad. We’ll have such wild and wonderful things to discuss once you cross over.”
“You can forget about that for a while. I still have a mission on this side.”
The spirit of the old man shrugged and chuckled. “Oh, to be thirty-five again and foolish, like you. Tonight, in your moccasins, I would walk until dawn. Then I’d go home and have a shower and a big breakfast—wherever I could find each.”
“Are you trying to tell me something?”
“We’ll see, Scout. The night is young,” answered Two Feathers, but Wild Eagle was already in his truck and screaming down the hillside.
He was racing for all his soul, and he was glad to have no company on the highway as he touched 120 miles per hour. He was only a hundred yards away when the explosion blew his RV to smithereens. He saw three cars pull onto the road ahead. He recognized the deputy as one driver, the sheriff as another, and the third seemed to be a Navajo he had once seen.
Wild Eagle reversed course and returned to his atomized RV. The cinder-block wall and his plants remained, but his trellis had blown away. The supports that lay under the RV were still in place, but everything else was gone. Fires burned here and there on his property where flammable odds and ends had decided to land and die. He parked his truck and checked the peyote and manzanilla for a body. He found none, and he was glad not to have had to do what that would have required by way of revenge.
As the detective watched the fires die down to embers, he took stock. “I am still alive. My truck is intact. As far as I know, my insurance will cover a replacement for my RV and its contents, to a degree. I did not find Pedro’s body in the wreckage. I still have my wall and my flowers. I guess I should be glad I was away entertaining my visions when they arrived to kill me.”
He drove to the Indian Wigwam Motel and booked a room for a week under his Indian name Wild Eagle. Since it was now dawn, he took a long, leisurely, warm shower before going to the motel restaurant for a big breakfast.
The Native American waitress who served him liked him right away. She poured him extra coffee though he did not ask for a refill. She seemed to be a person who had experienced the thorns of life and bled. He tried to be sympathetic, but he must have failed. She laid his check on the table.
“I haven’t had the chance to see the morning paper. Do you recall the main headlines? If you can, I’ll double your tip.”
She brightened up at the thought of a big tip. “‘Detective’s RV Blown Sky High,’ at the top. Middle right, ‘FBI Investigates Trafficking Rings Run by Sheriff’s Office.’ Bottom spread, ‘Undocumented boys and girls to be deported.’”
By the time she finished the last headline, he had laid a five-dollar tip on the table. On his cell phone, he was talking fast to his newspaper friend Mickey Flynn, a bottom feeder whose appetite for scoops was unlimited.
“Mickey, this is Scout. I’m trying to do seven things at once. I know you’ve read the morning Republican, but the real story is being missed. Do you want the scoop or not?”
So Scout met Mickey at a coffee house midway between Scottsdale and Tuba City. Scout knew the newsman had a phonographic memory, so he did not waste time repeating himself. As the investigative reporter’s jaw dropped wide and his eyes expanded like black saucers, Scout poured out what he knew about the genuine state of affairs. He also advised Mickey to talk with as many of the young deportees as he could before they boarded their planes.
It is often assumed that the rich and famous will block all stories that are contrary to their interests, but when a story involves federal crimes committed by local elected officials and their appointees, they will not hesitate to knot the nooses and conduct the hangings as fast as possible. Mickey’s story about the twin trafficking rings might have been sufficient to earn the man a Pulitzer prize, but when that was tied to the scam the sheriff and his deputy were running to abet the continuing criminal enterprise, the story was prime material for universal syndication. Within two days, papers worldwide ran the initial Flynn story, from the Bangkok Post to the Moscow Times. Then the syndicated follow-on tales began with the sordid interviews with the children and with Sister Barbara, stalwart champion of lost causes.
Four days after the first story hit the streets, Pedro sat opposite the detective in the restaurant of his motel. “Detective, I went by the place where your RV used to be, but you were never there. I tried to think where I would have gone in your place if I had decided to stay in the vicinity. I finally found you.”
“You’re getting better at this detective work than I am, Pedro. What can I do for you?”
“If you buy me a big breakfast, I’ll tell you what I know.”
The detective raised his hand and caught his waitress’s attention. “Brenda, please bring my friend here whatever he wants from the menu. I’ll be paying—with a big tip for you if you treat him like the king of Spain.”
Brenda curtsied and held her pencil above her order form. Pedro sat up in his chair and did the establishment justice by ordering one of nearly everything. The waitress’s smile broadened with every addition. When he had finished, she staggered off to the kitchen.
“The sheriff just committed suicide, and he left a long note blaming the scam on his deputy.”
“That hasn’t hit the news yet. Do you mind if I summon a reporter I know to hear the rest?”
Flynn told Wild Eagle that he was going to be at the restaurant within twenty minutes, traffic permitting. By then, Pedro was completing his meal. Wild Eagle ordered them coffees and explained to Brenda that the new guest was the famous reporter. She sensed an increasing tip, so she was on her best behavior. She also tried to fill their cups often so she could catch as much of their conversation as possible.
Brenda caught the words “extortion,” “murder,” “attempted murder,” “arson,” “trafficking,” “sex,” and “drugs” coming from Pedro and Wild Eagle. From the reporter, she heard things like, “You don’t mean it!”
“Brenda, you are so caught up in what we’re saying, you might as well have a seat after you pour one more round. We’re only just getting started,” Wild Eagle said.
Pedro’s commentary on the trafficking businesses from the inside blew Flynn’s mind, according to the hardened investigative reporter. Finally, when everything had been said, Wild Eagle laid down the rules.
“Brenda, you’re going to have to keep everything under your wig until it hits the papers. Don’t frown. You heard it first. All right?”
She nodded, crestfallen that she could not run out and tell all her friends.
“Mickey, you cannot use Pedro’s name, and you’ll have to make every effort not to give any details that would identify him to the public.”
“You really like to hurt a fella, don’t you?”
“Yes, or no?”
“Of course, yes—I mean no, I won’t hurt the boy.”
“Likewise, Sister Barbara. When you see her for your follow-up, keep her complicity under wraps. She is the village saint in the woodwork. Okay?”
“You got it.”
The detective dropped a ten-dollar bill on the table with a wink for Brenda. He then picked up his cell phone and called his insurance claim adjuster. The man told him what he wanted to hear.
“Pedro, do you want to come with me to pick out my new dwelling at the Phoenix RV?”
“Sí. Are you getting a whole new home?”
“Maybe. It may be used, or it may be new, but by the end of the day, I’ll have something to deliver to my old foundations.”
Flynn shook hands with Scout and Pedro as they piled into the detective’s truck.
“Well, Pedro, the story is never over, but today we are both on the right side of the action.”
“If you say so, Detective.”
“Why don’t you just call me Scout?”
The two executed a perfect high five.