The Dogs of Winter Read Online Free PDF

though Travis supposed she was in her mid-twenties. “What can I do for you?” he asked.
    “I was wondering,” she said, “if we might talk.”
    In recent months, Travis had hired a secretary, a young Hupa woman by the name of Denice. She came in three days a week. Saturday was not one of them. In her absence the office was dark and empty and damp.
    As Travis turned on lights, Kendra Harmon seated herself on an old couch beneath a bulletin board. The board was filled to overflowing with various fliers, handbills, and leaflets. The material spoke in elevated tones of everything from night classes in Native American Studies to stints in the armed services.
    When he had brightened the place up as much as possible he seated himself on the edge of his desk. He discovered Mrs. Harmon examining the board at her back. She was turned in what Travis found to be a provocative pose—one which accentuated the aquiline profile, the long line of her neck, the faint movement of her pulse.
    “Anyone from around here ever go to Kuwait?” she asked.
    There was a poster on the board advertising jobs in the Middle East.
    “Never.”
    She turned to him. “Not one?”
    “Not a single one.”
    “But it’s such a nice poster.”
    Travis nodded. “Yeah, and it cost me ten bucks.”
    “That’s too bad,” she said.
    He thought maybe she was joking with him, but if she was, he couldn’t see it.
    “You probably wonder why I’m here.”
    Travis shrugged. He noted for the first time that the cap she wore was embroidered above the bill with a silver skull and crossbones. The skull had tiny red dots for eyes and a toothy smile and it was something he had seen before. He had, if he was not mistaken, seen it worn by the previous owner of the trailer in which the Harmons now lived, a local girl recently murdered by an unemployed Hupa fisherman named Marvus Dove. The observation struck him as somewhat unsettling.
    “Do you mind if I smoke?” she asked.
    Travis handed her an ashtray from his desk.
    Mrs. Harmon placed the ashtray near her foot. She took a pack of cigarettes from her jacket then sat with it in her hand. “Amanda left things,” she said. “There were boxes in the workroom that came with the trailer.” The words issued in a kind of staccato burst, as if she had been harboring them for some time.
    Travis nodded. Amanda Jaffey was the name of the girl killed by Marvus Dove, and Travis concluded that he had been right about the cap. He noticed for the first time a tattoo on one of Kendra’s fingers—her ring finger on her left hand. This puzzled him, for he thought the tattoo familiar and yet he could not recall having seen it there before.
    “No one ever showed up to claim the things,” Kendra said. “I wound up going through them. There were some clothes there, stuff I could use.” She looked at the unopened pack of cigarettes. “I’d heard that Marvus Dove’s family had hired a private detective. I was wondering if this was something he ought to know about.”
    “Marvus Dove is dead,” Travis said at length. “Why would his family hire a detective?”
    “I thought you might know. I remembered you had this office. I can’t exactly ask around on my own. We’re not liked there.”
    “Who told you they hired a private detective?” It was an absurd notion.
    The girl shrugged. “Someone.”
    “A wagay. Not an Indian.”
    “ Wagays. That’s what you call us?”
    “Some do.”
    “So why not an Indian?”
    “Because an Indian wouldn’t hire a private cop for a dead Indian. They probably wouldn’t hire one for a live Indian.”
    “What would they hire?”
    “A hee-dee, maybe. If they hired anybody.”
    “What’s a hee-dee? ”
    Travis smiled. Hee-dee was a word he’d heard his father use. He was not sure where it came from. “Someone adept at the black magic,” he told her. “If they thought Marvus had been innocent, they might hire a hee-dee. See if the medicine man could figure out who did it, put a