Free Coyote Waits by Tony Hillerman Page B

of a car. I really don’t remember much about that now.”
    “Do you remember what you were doing out there?”
    Ji smiled and nodded. “I remember that,” he said. “It looked like it might rain. Rain clouds back over the mountains. It rains a lot in my country and I miss it out here. I thought I would drive out and enjoy it.”
    “How did you go?” Chee asked.
    Ji thought. “I drove south on U.S. 666 toward Gallup, and then I turned west on that paved road over to Red Rock, and then circled back on the gravel road.”
    “Did you see a Tribal Police car?”
    “Ah, yes,” Ji said. “One passed me.”
    “Where?”
    “On the Red Rock road.”
    That would have been Delbert’s Unit 44. “Did you see it again?”
    “No.”
    “You would have passed it,” Chee said. “It had pulled off the left side of the road and driven down a dirt track.”
    “I didn’t notice it,” Ji said. “I think I would have remembered that.”
    “Did you meet anyone, I mean on your way home?”
    Mr. Ji thought about it. “Probably,” he said. “But I don’t remember.”
    And that was exactly all they learned.
    From the parking lot, they drove southward down 666, across the San Juan bridge.
    “You want to go see where it happened?” he asked Janet.
    She looked at him, surprised. “Do you?”
    “Not exactly,” he said. “But yes, I guess I do.”
    “You haven’t been back?”
    “I was in the hospital in Albuquerque for weeks,” Chee said. “And then, I don’t know, there just wasn’t any reason.”
    “Okay,” Janet said. “I think I should see it.”
    “You have a better reason than I do,” Chee said. “I’ve got nothing to do with it anymore. It’s FBI business. I’ll just testify as the arresting officer.”
    Janet nodded. She saw no reason to comment on any of this. Chee knew she already knew it.
    “I didn’t do any of the investigating,” he added, knowing she would have known that, too.
    “Do you think the FBI took a statement from Mr. Ji?”
    Chee shook his head. “He would have mentioned it.”
    “Doesn’t it surprise you that they didn’t?”
    He shook his head. “Not now. Remember? You explained it to me. They have all they need for a conviction. Why waste their time?”
    She was frowning. “I know I said that. But they’d seen your statement. They knew you’d met that car driving away from the scene. You described it as a white Jeepster, said who owned it. I’d think just simple curiosity . . .” She let it trail off.
    “They had their man, and their evidence,” Chee said. “Why make things complicated?”
    Janet thought about that. “Justice,” she said.
    Chee let it pass. Justice, he thought, wasn’t a concept that fit very well in this affair. Besides, the sun was just dipping behind the Chuskas now. On the vast, rolling prairie that led away from the highway toward the black shape of Ship Rock every clump of sagebrush, every juniper, every snakeweed, every hummock of bunch grass cast its long blue shadow — an infinity of lines of darkness undulating across the glowing landscape. Beautiful. Chee’s spirit lifted. No time to think of justice. Or of the duty he had left undone.
    Janet’s Toyota topped the long climb out of the San Juan Basin and earth sloped away to the south — empty, rolling gray-tan grassland with the black line of the highway receding toward the horizon like the mark of a ruling pen. Miles to the south, the sun reflected from the windshield of a northbound vehicle, a blink of brightness. Ship Rock rose like an oversized, free-form Gothic cathedral just to their right, miles away but looking close. Ten miles ahead Table Mesa sailed through its sea of buffalo grass, reminding Chee of the ultimate aircraft carrier. Across the highway from it, slanting sunlight illuminated the ragged black form of Barber Peak, a volcanic throat to geologists, a meeting place for witches in local lore.
    They did the right turn off 666 onto Navajo 33, driving into the