Coyote Waits Read Online Free PDF Page A

believed from what he heard on the radio that Nez had seen this person and expected to apprehend the subject. He said the radio signal was breaking up but that he heard Nez laughing and Nez did not appear to want a backup.”
    Leaphorn snorted, an angry sound and unintentionally loud. He glanced up to see if the women had noticed. They had.
    He covered his embarrassment with a question. “Did anyone tell you about the circumstances?”
    “They said he was, arrested out there where it happened,” Mrs. Keeyani said. “They said he had the gun that killed that policeman.”
    “Did they tell you that he hasn’t denied it?” Leaphorn asked. But he was thinking of Jim Chee. Irritated. Nez did not appear to want a backup. Whether he wanted one or not, the rules said Chee should be there. But that was Chee’s reputation. He made his own rules. Smart. Unusually smart. But not a team player. So he was sitting in the trading post at Red Rock drinking coffee while Nez, alone, was dealing with a homicidal drunk armed with a pistol.
    “I don’t know what my uncle told them,” Mary Keeyani said. She shook her head. “But I know he didn’t do it. Not Hosteen Pinto. He wouldn’t kill anybody.”
    Leaphorn waited, watching her face, giving her a chance to say more. She simply sat, looking down at her hands.
    Finally she said: “A long, long time ago, before I was born. . . . He got in a fight then, when he was young, and a man was killed. But he was a wild boy then, and drunk. Now he is an old man. He doesn’t drink now. Not for years.”
    It was not something to argue about. Instead Leaphorn said, “He won’t tell them anything at all. That’s what I’m told. Not a word. Not even to his lawyer.”
    Mrs. Keeyani looked at her hands. “That wasn’t his gun,” she said. “My uncle had an old .22 rifle. A single-shot rifle. He still has that. It’s in his hogan.”
    Leaphorn said nothing. This interested him. That pistol Pinto had was a Ruger, an expensive model and not what you would expect a man like Pinto to own. On the other hand, there could be a thousand explanations of why he did own it.
    “Perhaps you didn’t know about this pistol,” Leaphorn said.
    Now it was Mrs. Keeyani’s turn to be surprised. “He is my mother’s brother,” she said. “He never got married. His place was there at our grandmother’s place behind Yon Dot Mountain.”
    Leaphorn needed no more explanation. If Ashie Pinto had owned an expensive Ruger revolver, his relatives would have known it. He glanced back at the FBI report, looking for the name of the investigating officer. Agent Theodore Rostik. He’d never heard of Rostik, which meant he was a newcomer to the Gallup office — either fresh and green from the FBI Academy, or an older agent exiled as a lost cause. Up-and-comers in the agency were not sent to places like Farmington, or Fargo, or Gallup, or other towns considered Siberian by the Bureau hierarchy. These were the billets for new men without political connections in the agency, or those who had fallen from grace — perhaps having caused bad publicity (the agency’s mortal sin) or shown signs of original thinking. For Leaphorn the point was that Rostik might be unusually stupid, or unusually smart — either of which might cause his exile. But most likely he was simply green.
    “I’ll tell you what I think you should do,” he said to Mrs. Keeyani without looking up from the report. “Hosteen Pinto has a lawyer who may be green but will be smart. The Federal Public Defender just hires the smart ones. Work with her. Tell her the strange things that trouble you. She will send out one of the investigators to learn the facts. I know one of them personally, a very good man. You should work with them.”
    Leaphorn read on, not looking up, waiting for a response. He heard Mrs. Keeyani shift in her chair. But the voice he heard was Dr. Bourebonette’s. “Are they Navajos?” she asked. “Would they understand that