Free Coyote Waits by Tony Hillerman

don’t have to go looking for Coyote. Coyote’s always out there waiting.”
    Professor Bourebonette had offered to share driving on the way home and Leaphorn had explained to her that Tribal Police rules prohibited it. Now, about fifty miles east of Tuba City, Leaphorn began wishing he hadn’t. He was exhausted. Talking had helped keep sleep at bay for the first hour or so. They talked about McGinnis, about what Tagert might have wanted Hosteen Pinto to find, about Pinto’s reluctance. They discussed how Navajo mythology related to the origin story of the Old Testament, and to myths of the Plains Indians, and police techniques in criminal investigations, and civil rights, and academic politics. She had told him about the work she had done studying mythology in Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam, before the intensifying war made it impossible. And now Leaphorn was talking about his days as a graduate student at Arizona State, and specifically about a professor who was either weirdly absent-minded or over the hill into senility.
    “Trouble is, I’m beginning to notice I’m forgetting things myself,” he concluded.
    The center stripe had become double, waving off in two directions. Leaphorn shook his head, jarring himself awake. He glanced at Bourebonette to see if she’d noticed.
    Professor Bourebonette’s chin was tilted slightly forward, her head leaned against the door. Her face was relaxed in sleep.
    Leaphorn studied her. Emma had slept like that sometimes on late night returns. Relaxed. Trusting him.
     
6
     
    THE BATTERED WHITE Jeepster proved remarkably easy to locate. It sat in space number seventeen in a weedy parking lot guarded by a sign that declared:
     
    SHIP ROCK HIGH SCHOOL
TEACHER/STAFF PARKING ONLY
     
    Janet Pete parked her little Toyota two-door beside the jeep. She’d changed out of her go-see-a-sick-friend skirt into jeans and a long-sleeved blue shirt.
    “There it is. Exactly as you planned,” she said. “You want to wait here for the owner?” She motioned to the cars streaming out of the teacher/staff parking lot, a surprising number it seemed to Chee. “It shouldn’t be long.”
    “I want to know who I’m talking to,” Chee said, climbing out. “I’ll go ask.”
    The secretary in the principal’s office looked at Jim Chee’s badge, and through the window to where he was pointing, and said “Which one?” and then said, “Oh.”
    “That’s Mr. Ji’s,” she said. “Are you going to arrest him?” Her voice sounded hopeful.
    “Gee,” Chee said. “How does he spell it?”
    “It’s H-U-A-N J-I,” she said, “so I guess if you pronounced it the way we pronounce ‘na-va-
ho
’ it would be ‘Mr. Hee.’”
    “I heard he was a Vietnamese. Or Cambodian,” Chee said.
    “Vietnamese,” the secretary said. “I think he was a colonel in their army. He commanded a Ranger battalion.”
    “Where could I find him?”
    “His algebra class is down in room nineteen,” she said, gesturing down the hallway. “School’s over but he usually keeps part of them overtime.” She laughed. “Mr. Ji and the kids have a permanent disagreement over how much math they are going to learn.”
    Chee paused at the open door of room nineteen. Four boys and a girl were scattered at desks, heads down, working on notebooks. The girl was pretty, her hair cut unusually short for a young Navajo woman. The boys were two Navajos, a burly, sulky-looking white, and a slender Hispano. But Chee’s interest was in the teacher.
    Mr. Huan Ji stood beside his desk, his back to the class and his profile to Chee, staring out the classroom window. He was a small man, and thin, rigidly erect, with short-cropped black hair and a short-cropped mustache showing gray. He wore gray slacks, a blue jacket, and a white shirt with a tie neatly in place and looked, therefore, totally misplaced in Ship Rock High School. His unblinking eyes studied something about level with the horizon. Seeing what? Chee wondered. He would