“Did you really,” Chee said. “Wow.”

“I think it was just good timing. He’d figured out someone else had done it.”

“But what makes you think he has this high opinion of me?” Chee said. “I don’t often get that impression.”

“The hit-and-run case. He thinks you can solve it.”

“No he doesn’t. Or he didn’t. He doesn’t think anyone can solve it.”

“He told me that, too,” Janet said. “No clues. But really, he thinks you can do it.”

Chee took his eyes off the road again. She was looking straight ahead so all he could see was her profile. Hard to understand, but a beautiful profile.

She spent only a few minutes in the Crownpoint station and emerged with Eugene Ahkeah in tow. Ahkeah looked tired and disheveled. “I told Mr. Ahkeah we’d give him a ride home,” she said. They did, dropping him off at his mobile home.

“Blizzard was kidding me about Navajos being talkative,” Chee said. “He should meet your client.”

“He’s resentful,” Janet said. “He thinks he was arrested just because he was handy.”

“Well, now,” Chee said, feeling a touch resentful himself, “there was the matter of finding all that stolen stuff under his house.”

“Yes, but-” Janet said, and stopped. “Let’s not argue.”

They drove in silence through the rolling, autumn grassland. It is a hundred and five miles from Thoreau to Farmington and there were days when Chee had made the drive without seeing another vehicle. Today they had met a car and two pickups before they were ten miles north of Crownpoint.

“Heavy traffic day,” Chee said, hoping to restart a conversation.

“You wanted to ask me about something. Remember?”

“I do,” Chee said. He fished the tape out of his glove box and put it into the tape player and pushed the play button. “But first I want you to listen to this.”

Janet listened.

“That doesn’t happen very often,” she said. “I heard about this but it didn’t seem real. Did he send any money?”

“Six twenties, two tens, and a five,” Chee said. “In the U.S. mail.”

She thought about that. Shrugged. “And nobody recognized him of course, or he’d be in jail by now. How about the description?”

“The usual. Middle-aged, middle-sized, average-looking Navajo male, wearing average-looking Navajo clothing. He was wearing one of those long-billed baseball caps with the bill bent, and he smelled like onions, and he drove a middle-aged, middle-sized, middle-green pickup truck with a bumper sticker which said ‘Ernie is the greatest.’”

“Smelled like onions?” She looked at him, eyebrows raised with the question.

“Middle of the morning,” Chee said. “Too early for your Lottaburger onion fix.”

“Now you see why I think Lieutenant Leaphorn thinks you’re going to nail this guy?” She was smiling at him.

Which Chee enjoyed. But this was not the time for basking. He said, “This stopped being a tough one as soon as he walked into that radio station. It’s not tough now. Now we catch him because of that bumper sticker.”

“Surely he’d have gotten rid of that. He’d have soaked it off as soon as he got home.”

“I don’t think so,” Chee said. “Neither do the Farmington police, or the New Mexico state cops. He’ll keep driving that pickup out on the highway and sooner or later a cop drives up behind him and sees it.”

Janet looked unpersuaded. She shrugged. “I defer to your experience in such matters. As for me, I’d have painted over it, or something.”

Chee thought about that. “No,” he said, looking at her. “I have a feeling you’d turn yourself in.”

They were driving almost due north through a landscape devoid of humans and the signs that humans leave. Jim Chee loved it for its emptiness. Its beauty had always stirred him and it now stirred him out of his pessimism. Things will work out, he thought. Somehow they’ll work out. They passed the junction that offered thirty miles of dirt road and the White Rock Chapter House to the left, and the much shorter dirt road to the Lake Valley Chapter House to the right. Behind the grassy hills to the right, Kenbeto Wash, and Bettonie Tsossie Wash, and Escalvada Wash, and Fajada Wash all got together after draining thousands of square miles of mountain slopes and mesas, and moved enough water to be called the Chaco River. On this afternoon of a dry autumn, the Chaco bridge crossed a broad expanse of sand on which dust devils were being produced by the autumn breeze (or, as his mother would have assured him, by those playful yeis, the Blue Flint Boys).

Janet broke the long silence. “Why do you think I would give myself up?”

“I’m going to answer that the Navajo way,” Chee said, and laughed. “That means you have to be patient, because it’s very roundabout. It’s all about culture.”

“I don’t want to talk about culture,” she said.

“For convenience, let’s call our hit-and-run driver Gorman. Let’s say he’s a widower. Doesn’t drink much, usually. We’ll follow the script in the radio tape but give him more of a personality. He’s a hard worker. All the good things. Something comes along to be celebrated. His birthday, maybe. His friends take him out to a bar off the reservation. Driving home he hits this pedestrian. Like in the tape, he hears something and backs up. But he’s drunk. He doesn’t see anybody. So he drives away. Now I’m a member of the Navajo Tribal Police, also deputized by a couple of the counties in Arizona and New Mexico, sworn to uphold the law. My boss wants me to catch this guy. So one day I catch him. What do I do?”

“Is that the question?” Janet said, surprised. “That’s what you want to ask me?”

“That starts it,” he said.

“Well, it’s not pleasant, but it’s not too hard either. You just think about why you have laws. Society puts a penalty on driving drunk because it kills people. It puts a penalty for leaving the scene of an injury accident for pretty much the same reason. So what you do is arrest this guy who broke those laws and present the evidence in court, and the court finds he was guilty. And then the judge weighs the circumstances. First offense, solid citizen, special circumstances. It seems unlikely that the crime will be repeated. And so forth. So the judge sentences him to maybe a year, maybe two years, and then probation for another eight years or so.” She studied him. “You agree?”

“That was phase one,” Chee said. “I’m going to make it harder for you now. We’ll give this guy some social value. Let’s say he is taking care of a disabled kid. Maybe a grandchild whose parents have dropped him on our Gorman while they do their thing. Maybe a broken family. Father took off, mother a drunk. You make your own plot. Now what do you do?”

“Come on, Jim,” she said. “Why not make him a biologist? He’s about to unlock the secret of the AIDS virus. But he can’t leave his laboratory even for one minute to be arrested or his test tubes will all dry up and his cultures will die. It doesn’t change the basic principle. Society passes laws to ensure justice. The guy broke the society’s laws. Justice is required.”

“Okay,” Chee said. “Now we get to the next phase. More complicated. We’ll say this bird is a Navajo and the guy he killed was a Navajo.”

“What’s the difference?” Janet asked. “He violated the laws of the Navajo Nation, too. If you have justice, it spells out the punishment in advance. It tells you if you do this harm to society, then society does this harm to you. We’ll lock you up, for example. Or fine you. The idea is prevention.”

“Right,” Chee said. “Now we enter phase two of this problem.”

“We just finished phase two,” Janet said. “But it’s better than talking about culture.”

“Okay, now for phase three,” Chee said. “We’re dealing with justice. Just retribution. That’s a religious concept, really. We’ll say the tribal cop is sort of religious. He honors his people’s traditional ways. He has been taught another notion of justice. He was a big boy before he heard about ‘make the punishment fit the crime’ or ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ Instead of that he was hearing of retribution in another way. If you damage somebody, you sit down with their family and figure out how much damage and make it good. That way you restore hozho. You’ve got harmony again between two families. Not too much difference from the standard American justice. But now it gets different, If somebody harms you out of meanness – say you get in a bar fight and he cuts you, or he keeps cutting your fences, or stealing your sheep – then he’s the one who’s out of hozho. You aren’t taught he should be punished. He should be cured. Gotten back in balance with what’s around him. Made beautiful again-” He glanced at her. She was looking straight ahead, apparently listening.