Read The Sinister Pig - 15 for Free Online

Tribal Police to become a Border Patrol Officer, and about the letter from her in his jacket pocket, what it had said about the dangerous-sounding work she was doing, and, worse, its absolute lack of any hint of missing him. But Chee didn’t want to talk to Osborne about Bernie. He let the remark pass and went back to the question of Mankin.
    “Or perhaps Mankin was in the act of doing something very important for some very big bureaucrat,” Chee said. “What do you think?”
    “I don’t think,” Osborne said. “Remember? You told me federal employees aren’t allowed to do that.”
    “Come on, Osborne,” Chee said. “Someone big in federal affairs believes this is important or we wouldn’t even know about the credit card. The purchases were recent. [38] Somebody big had to call Mr. Visa himself and get a drop-everything computer check made on that Mankin number. Right?”
    “They don’t tell me things like that.”
    “And they still haven’t told you whether they’ve identified our well-dressed homicide victim? Right?”
    Osborne nodded.
    “Let me speculate then. Let’s say the officially unidentified body and the Visa card both belong to Carl Mankin. And Mankin was either a much-trusted and highly ranked agent of something like the National Security Agency, or the Central Intelligence Agency, Drug Enforcement, or our new Homeland Security Agency, or any of the other ten or twelve federal intelligence bureaucracies busy competing with one another, and now his bosses have missed him. And they want to know who killed him? Or, more important, why?”
    Osborne looked at Chee, yawned, and resumed staring out the window.
    “So we’re out here on the off chance that we will catch whoever got off with Mankin’s credit card, and he will tell us something useful.” Chee said. “Is that it?”
    “I wonder who started that notion that Navajos were silent, taciturn people,” Osborne said. “My theory is the killer is the lead scout for a flying saucer invasion and he had to shoot Mankin because Mankin had uncovered their conspiracy to take over our planet? Or how about Carl Mankin is a favorite nephew of the president’s best friend? That sound all right?” He turned off his tape player, fished another tape out of the glove box, and looked at it. “How about James Taylor in Concert? He’s good.”
    [39] “Whatever,” Chee said. “You’re the one who listens to it. And you know what I’m going to do tomorrow, if we’re not still out here waiting for Volks? I’m going to a man I know who accepts Visa cards from his customers, give him this Mankin number, and get him to call Visa for a background check. Then I’ll tell you, and you can pass it along to the top brass in the Bureau.”
    “I listen to the music to keep me from listening to you,” Osborne said. “You’d finally wear me down and I’d be leaking all of our secrets.”
    So James Taylor’s voice floated in, barely audible through the wrong side of Osborne’s earphones, something about plans putting an end to someone catching Chee’s attention. The plans someone made had permanently put an end to a still-unidentified well-dressed middle-aged man who might, or might not, be Carl Mankin. But whose plans? And what plans? And how did this fellow fit into them. Apparently not well because he’d been shot and then dumped facedown into a shallow wash and buried so casually that the wind had blown the dirt away from one hand and the back of his head. A sad way to go into that next existence.
    Osborne had removed his headphones to rub his ear just as James Taylor was remembering the lonely times when he could not find a friend. His sadness worsened Chee’s mood. When his time came, Chee knew, his kin would come, and his friends. One of the Mormons in his paternal clan would suggest an undertaker, one of the born-again Christians in his maternal clan would agree, and the traditionals would politely ignore this. The designated one would wash his