Rock with Wings Read Free Page B

totem poles. He pulled over again when they reached a pullout with a view of Comb Ridge, frozen waves of rock. They climbed out and Bernie took more pictures while he savored the beauty.
    “You’re really quiet today,” he said. “Everything OK?”
    “I keep thinking about that dirt, you know, the boxes in that car I stopped yesterday? I’m dying to know how he used that to hide drugs. Or to hide something else. I keep replaying the scene and wondering what I missed.”
    “If that guy hadn’t offered you five hundred bucks, would you have been suspicious?”
    “Sure, wouldn’t you have been? Why would somebody have boxes of dirt in the trunk? Why was he so nervous and sweaty?”
    “That’s the thing about being a cop. You run into all kinds.”
    “I know. I almost wish we could have put off our trip just so I could find out what that guy was up to. You know, see for myself how he hid the drugs.”
    Chee took a breath. Now, he decided, was as good a time as any to tell her. “Speaking of work, Largo got a call from the guy in charge of the office in Kayenta. They opened a little substation at Monument Valley because of all the visitors this summer and a movie that’s being made there. The filming is taking longer than expected, and some of the officers on duty had a training scheduled. Largo asked me, as long as we were out this way, if I could fill in for them for a few days.”
    Bernie looked at him, waiting for the rest. He shrugged. “How tough can it be, babysitting some Hollywood types?”
    “But what about our vacation?”
    “We still have four days. I don’t have to go to work until the end of the week. By then, you’ll probably be sick of me anyway.”
    “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
    Chee heard the irritation in her voice.
    “He just called when we stopped for gas. You know, we can use the money.”
    “I know.”
    She turned from him and looked out the window. “I guess that goes with the territory when you’re married to a cop. We’ll just make the most of the time we’ve got.”
    “Good plan,” he said. “We’ll call this vacation lite.” They passed the junction for Bluff, Utah, and headed on to Kayenta, Arizona, the last town before Monument Valley.
    “You hungry?” Chee asked. “There’s a hamburger place here that has a Code Talker museum. It’s pretty cool.”
    “I’m OK. I can’t wait to see the monuments. Let’s stop there on our way home.”
    Paul greeted them with enthusiasm and a snack of sweet watermelon. Then he offered them a tour that started with a vehicle parked under a ramada.
    “This is my joy, my baby.” Paul gave Chee a playful punch in the arm. “I want to take you guys for a ride.”
    The baby had six wheels and looked like the hybrid offspring of a bus and a heavy-duty pickup. The front was a truck chassis, the back a platform with seats on both sides of a central aisle and metal siding that came halfway up. A striped awning deflected the sun. The cover and the vehicle itself were yellow, the color of fertility, a sign, Chee thought, that Paul intended not only for his vehicle to stand out but also for his business to grow. Someone had carefully painted “Hozhoni Photo Tours” on the hood.
    Bernie climbed up inside. “Nice Jeep. You can haul a lot of people with this.”
    “It looks like a Jeep, but it’s an old military vehicle. It has a speaker system so the driver can talk to visitors. I call it a People Mover. The folks who ran the tours at Canyon de Chelly used it and I bought it from the old Thunderbird Lodge. Chee and I had some fun back in the canyon. You remember that, bro?”
    Chee nodded.
    “We’ll make a trial run in it later. Let me show you the rest of this place.”
    They admired the solar shower he’d constructed, walked past an aged corral with a pair of horses, saw his single-wide and the hard-packed dirt basketball court next to it. Then came the new hogan. As Chee had suspected, but not mentioned to Bernie, it was