Hunting Badger (1999)

Tony Hillerman's Navajo mystery, with Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, was first printed in hardcover by HarperCollins in November 1999. It opens before dawn on a Friday the thirteenth at the Ute Casino under Sleeping Ute Mountain, where the payday money is waiting for the armored truck and the young deputy Teddy Bai is outside in the parking lots. (Open Library)

Watches

Timex (unidentified model): Teddy, a Montezuma County deputy working a part-time job with casino security and waiting for a little blue Ford Escort that is late, walks out of the light to check the stars, then pushes the illumination button on his Timex: three forty-six. A man in what look like coveralls carries an extension ladder to the casino wall and goes up onto the roof, and Teddy wonders aloud what that is about. Bai is later the suspect held in the hospital (p. 35). It is the novel's one Timex. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: Teddy pushed the illumination button on his Timex. Three-forty-six. Now the little blue car was late enough to make him wonder a little. (Tony Hillerman, Hunting Badger, scan cataloged as HarperCollins, 1999 (the copy is the HarperTorch paperback of January 2001; copyright 1999, first HarperCollins hardcover printing November 1999), p. 4; Internet Archive scan OCR)