Skinwalkers

In other words, who called Janet Pete?

He would find out. Right now. The very next step. As soon as he finished breakfast.

He unplugged his coffeepot, filled his coffee cup with water, swirled it gently, and drank it down.

('I never saw anybody do that before,' Mary Landon had said.

'What?'

'That with the water you rinsed your cup with.' Empty-handed, she had mimicked the swirling and the drinking.

It still had taken him a moment to understand. 'Oh,' he had said. 'If you grow up hauling water, you don't ever learn to pour it out. You don't waste it, even if it tastes a little bit like coffee.'

'Odd,' Mary Landon said. 'What the old prof in Sociology 101 would call a cultural anomaly.'

It had seemed odd to Chee that not wasting water had seemed odd to Mary Landon. It still seemed odd.)

He put the pot under the sink. 'Look out, Cat,' he said. And the cat, instead of diving for the exit flap as it normally did when he came anywhere near this close, moved down the trailer. It sat under his bunk, looking at him nervously.

It took a millisecond for Jim Chee to register the meaning of this.

Something out there.

He sucked in his breath, reached for his belt, extracted his pistol. He could see nothing out the door except his pickup and the empty slope. He checked out of each of the windows. Nothing moved. He went through the door in a crouched run, holding the pistol in front of him. He stopped in the cover of the pickup.

Absolutely nothing moved. Chee felt the tension seep away. But something had driven in the cat. He walked to its den, eyes on the ground. In the softer earth around the juniper there were paw prints. A dog? Chee squatted, studying them. Coyote tracks.

Back in the trailer, the cat was sitting on his bedroll. They looked at each other. Chee noticed something new. The cat was pregnant.

'Coyote's after you, I guess,' Chee said. 'That right?'

The cat looked at him.

'Dry weather,' Chee said. 'No rain. Water holes dry up. Prairie dogs, kangaroo rats, all that, they die off. Coyotes come to town and eat cats.'

The cat got up from the bedroll, edged toward the doorway. Chee got a better look at it. Not very pregnant yet. That would come later. It looked gaunt and had a new scar beside its mouth.

'Maybe I can fix something up for you,' Chee said. But what? Fixing something that would be proof against a hungry coyote would take some thought. Meanwhile he looked through the refrigerator. Orange juice, two cans of Dr. Pepper, limp celery, two jars of jelly, a half-consumed box of Velveeta: nothing palatable for a cat. On the shelf above the stove, he found a can of pork and beans, opened it, and left it on a copy of the Farmington Times beside the screen door. When he got back from finding out who called Janet Pete, he'd think of something to do about the coyote. He backed his pickup away from the trailer. In the rearview mirror he noticed that the cat was gulping down the beans. Maybe Janet Pete would have an idea about the cat. Sometimes women were smarter about such things.

But Janet Pete was not at the Shiprock DNA office, a circumstance that seemed to give some satisfaction to the young man in the white shirt and the necktie who answered Jim Chee's inquiry.

'When do you expect her?' Chee asked.

'Who knows?' the young man said.

'This afternoon? Or has she left town or something?'

'Maybe,' the man said. He shrugged.

'I'll leave her a message,' Chee said. He took out his notebook and his pen and wrote:

'Ms. Pete—I need to know who called you to come and get Roosevelt Bistie out of jail. Important. If I'm not in, please leave message.' He signed it and left the tribal police telephone number.

But on the way out, he saw Janet Pete pulling into the parking area. She was driving a white Chevy, newly washed, with the Navajo Nation's seal newly painted on its door. She watched him walk up, her face neutral.

'Ya-tah-hey,' Chee said.

Janet Pete nodded.

'If you have just a minute or two, I need to talk to you,' Chee said.

'Why?'

'Because Roosevelt Bistie's daughter told me she didn't call a lawyer for her father. I need to know who called you.'

And I need to know absolutely everything else you know about Roosevelt Bistie, Chee thought, but first things first.

Janet Pete's expression had shifted from approximately neutral to slightly hostile.

'It doesn't matter who called,' she said. 'We don't have to have a request for representation from the next of kin. It can be anybody.' She opened the car door and swung her legs out. 'Or it can be nobody, for that matter. If someone needs to have his legal rights protected, we don't have to be asked.'

Janet Pete was wearing a pale blue blouse and a tweed skirt. The legs she swung out of the car were very nice legs. And Miss Pete noticed that Chee had noticed.