“Hey,” Chee said. “Janet. What are you doing here?”
“I was waiting for you,” Janet Pete said, grinning at him. “I wanted to see how you look toasted.”
“Not much improvement,” Chee said, displaying the bandage on his hand. He used his good arm to hug her.
Janet hugged back, hard against Chee’s damaged chest.
“Aaagh!”
Janet recoiled. “Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Just a play for sympathy,” Chee said, breathing hard.
“I didn’t notice the bandages under your shirt,” Janet said, repentant.
“One on my leg, too,” Chee said, tapping his thigh and grinning at her. “The doctor said that altogether if you average it out, I was somewhere between medium rare and medium.”
“I just heard about it,” she said. “It happened just when I was moving. Back in Washington, they have so much local homegrown homicide that one way out here doesn’t make the paper. Not even if it’s a policeman.”
“I’d heard you’d come back home,” Chee said. “Or almost home. I was going to hunt you up when I got all these bandages off.” He was looking down at her, conscious that he was smiling like an ape, conscious that the receptionist was watching all this, conscious that Janet Pete had come to see him. “But how did you find me here?”
“I called your office in Ship Rock. They told me you were on sick leave. And the dispatcher asked around for me and found out you’d come to the burn center here for a checkup.” She touched the bandage with a tentative finger. “Is it better? Are you going to be all right?”
“Mostly just scars. Except for this hand. They think it will be all right, too. Probably. Or close enough so I can use it. But let’s get out of here. You have time for coffee?”
Janet Pete had time.
Walking from the university hospital, across the campus to the Frontier Restaurant, Janet touched gently on the death of Nez and deduced that Chee wasn’t ready to talk about it. Chee touched on Janet’s coming home from her law-firm job in Washington, and sensed this was a subject better returned to later. And so as they walked through the mild Albuquerque morning, they skipped further back in time and reminisced.
“Remember that day we met?” Janet said. “At the San Juan County jail. You were trying to keep my client locked up without charging him with anything. And I was being righteously indignant about it. Remember that?” She was laughing.
“I remember how I outsmarted you,” Chee said.
“Like hell you did,” Janet said. She stopped laughing. She stopped walking. “How? What do you mean?”
Chee looked back at her, grinning.
“What do you mean?” Janet demanded.
“Remember, you were getting your man out of lockup, and you had gotten his sack of stuff from the booking desk, and you got sore at me, thinking I was trying to worm some incriminating information out of him in the interrogation room. So when you went to call the FBI to complain about my conduct and get me called off, you took your client to the telephone with you.”
Janet was frowning. “I remember that,” she said. “The agent-in-charge said you didn’t have FBI authorization to talk to the man. What was his name?”
“Bisti,” Chee said. “Roosevelt Bisti.”
“Yes,” Janet said. “I remember he was sick. And I remember the fed said he wanted to talk to you and he told you to butt out. Didn’t he? So how did you outsmart me, wise guy?”
“When you went to the phone you took along Bisti, but you left his sack behind.”
Janet digested this. She walked toward him, shaking her head.
“You searched through his stuff,” she said, accusingly. “Is that what you’re telling me? That’s not outslicking me. That’s cheating.”
They were walking again, Chee still grinning. His hand hurt a little, and so did the burn on his chest, but he was enjoying this. He was happy.
“Whose rules?” he asked. “You’re a lawyer so you have to play by the biligaana rules. But you didn’t ask me what rules I was using.”
Janet laughed. “Okay, Jim,” she said. “Anyway, I got Old Man Bisti out of jail and out of your unfair clutches.”
“You enjoyed that job, didn’t you? I mean your work out on the Big Rez? Why don’t you go back to it? They’re short-handed. I’ll bet you could get your job back in a minute.”
“I am going back to it.”
“With the DNA?” Chee’s delight was in his voice. The Dinebeuna Nahulna be Agaditahe was the Navajo Tribe’s version of a legal aid society?providing legal counsel for those who couldn’t afford to pay. He’d be seeing Janet Pete a lot.
“Same sort of work but not the DNA,” she said. “I’ll be working for the Department of Justice. With the Federal Public Defender here in Albuquerque. I’ll be one of the court-appointed defense attorneys in federal criminal cases.”
“Oh,” Chee said. His quick mind formed two conclusions. Janet Pete, being Navajo and being the most junior lawyer on the staff, would have been given Ashie Pinto to represent. From that conclusion, the second was instantaneous and took the joy from the morning. Janet Pete had come to see Officer Jim Chee, not Friend Jim
