Excerpt • The Murder of Eddie Watchman

“I am a man and therefore have all devils in my heart.”
Father Brown, Fr. The Hammer of God

April, 2005

The guy comes from out of nowhere, which I guess is appropriate, seeing how that’s what we are in the big middle of. One second I’m standing there in the calm spring evening watching the plane descend, the next he’s right up behind me in the dark, telling me to stand still. Somehow I know from his voice—call it training—that he’s speaking from behind a gun, so I do what he says. I’m irritated. How had he been able to come up on me? What he says next—on the ground, face down—doesn’t help matters any.

Has to be a cop, I’m thinking, probably Navajo, and some of them no doubt know how to move through brush. But if he’s Navajo, I’m in luck. They rarely patrol with backup, so this guy is likely alone.

I start down—but onto my back and with my arm over my face. I can see he can’t tell the difference in the dark, and when he bends over to frisk me I do what I have to do. I kick his gun away with one foot, and when he looks up to see where it’s gone, I crush his jaw with the other. He falls on his face at my feet. I scratch around for a rock, and cave in the back of his skull, which starts me feeling better. Sneak up on me.

The rest of the evening goes as planned, except now we have a body and a Navajo police cruiser to get rid of, but I’m on it. The pilot and I quickly transfer the goods to the cruiser, along with the body. He follows in my truck as I drive my dead friend down to the water’s edge where the boat is, get out and roll him over the drop off into the deep water. Carey and I load the boat, he takes off, and I return the pilot to his craft, watch him lift off, then head for home—all in under an hour. Damn, we are good.

Sarah Tanner

Wouldn’t you know, I thought, it would be Pete and Paul who spotted the roof of the vehicle sticking out of the water? This lake draws characters like a magnet. I always figured it had something to do with all that water in the middle of all that dry. It just pushes people off center. But these two’d been here so long and collected so many crazy stories that I’d heard they hadn’t paid for a drink up at the Windy Mesa for years. So I knew getting the straight skinny out of them wasn’t going to be easy, especially as rattled as they were.

And I’d forgotten that they finish each other’s sentences, which made me crazy.
“We was just trolling close to shore…” said Paul.
“And he looked up and seen it,” added Pete. “So we had to move in…“
“For a closer look,” finished Paul.
What do they do, rehearse these things? I wondered.
“Then we seen it was a cruiser,” said Paul.
“A Navajo cruiser,” corrected Pete.
I felt my stomach roll over and my pulse quicken.
“That’s what I meant,” said Paul.
“Well, that’s not what you said,” Pete replied.
They stopped and looked at each other. They’d been friends for so long I realized that they actually had begun to look like each other, just like people and their pets.
“You sure about this?” I asked, hoping, but I knew.
They nodded, together.
Paul took a sip of the coffee I had brought after I had seen how shook up they were. “That’s not all we saw,” he said. “There was a body,” Pete jumped in. I felt my skin flush with anxiety.
Paul nodded. “In the cab,” he said.
“In the passenger’s seat,” Pete added.
“It looked pretty rough,” Paul said. They looked at each other again, and both shook their heads.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Like it had been there for a while,” said Pete.
“Anything else?” I asked. Now I had to know.
“The sun in the windshield. We saw something shiny,” said Paul.
“We think it was a badge,” said Pete.
“On his shirt,” added Paul.
“A police badge?” I asked.
They nodded again, together.

Of course, as head ranger, I had dispatched a boat immediately to secure the scene once Pete and Paul had calmed down enough to give me a location. I’d also called the bureau office in Flagstaff to get them started. Now Luke and I were headed out there to take a look ourselves. I offered a silent prayer, not that it wouldn’t be Eddie—after all, how many Navajo police officers and their cruisers were missing?—but for help in dealing with what was coming. Luke was quiet. I knew he was steeling himself for the same thing.

The late October sun had dropped so that we passed through alternating shadow and sun as we headed up the channel, the air chill or warm depending, but the sky between the steep walls of the canyon maintaining a steadfast Prussian blue. The lake was down so low there were places we felt like we were at the bottom of a well.

Luke was at the wheel. Men and driving, I thought, although to be fair to Luke he wasn’t bad that way. It was all about competence with him. Gender, appearance, color—none of that mattered if you could do the job. And frankly, I had to admit that he could handle a boat better than I. Especially when we were in a hurry and there were so many warning buoys for barely submerged rocks and lake bottom.

There wasn’t much we could do at the scene until the federal forensics guys showed up, which probably wouldn’t be until morning. We gave the overnight gear and provisions we had brought to Silas. He’d surrounded the cruiser with buoys and attached police tape to them, then done the same with stanchions on shore, for which I was secretly grateful. I couldn’t approach the cruiser and what was inside it without possibly contaminating the crime scene.

Silas also had called in the car number on the cruiser’s roof. I gazed around at the water and rock. What a desolate place to meet your maker, I thought with a chill.

Luke and I moored the boat, and then got out to look around. There wasn’t much shore, just the shelf on which the cruiser sat. After a few minutes, Luke started up the steep rock face directly behind the cruiser.

“You be careful,” I said. As usual, he was wearing his Tony Lamas, not the best climbing shoes. I was pretty sure he slept in them.
In about five minutes he disappeared over the top, but reappeared a minute later.
“It’s what I thought,” he said. “There’s a road up here.”

Just then, the call came through on the radio. The cruiser number came back. It was Eddie’s.