Free Mourning Dove by Aimée & David Thurlo

truck if you want to help,” he snapped. His tone was sharp.
    Ella glanced at him quickly, surprised. He was a solid, muscular man with empty black eyes. It was the look she’d heard referred to before as the one-hundred-yard stare.A gaze that saw everything . . . and nothing, like an old man who knew he was dying and had stopped caring a long time ago.
    “Sure. But I would have much rather shared a load than carry one on my own,” she added with a grin.
    He was impervious to her. “That’s you, not me.” Then as thewind brushed back her jacket, he saw her sidearm. “Cop, huh? You need a pistol to unload a truck?”
    “I’m on duty,”she snapped back.
    Clifford came back from where he was stacking the fencing beside the corral, sliding another length from the truck. “I see you’ve met,” he said, after the other man moved away with is load.
    “Rude jerk,” she mumbled.
    Although her voice had barely been above a whisper, somehow he’d managed to hear her. “I usually am,” he called back at her. “I never get on well with people whothink they deserve something simply because they carry a badge.”
    Ella clamped her jaw shut but, try as she did, she couldn’t let it pass. “You mean like the right to defend themselves when confronting armed criminals?” She wanted to thump him on the head with his cane.
    “I respect what you
try
to do—keep the peace. But you lose the second you strap on a gun. The Anglo way of meeting violencewith violence does little to solve the problem.”
    “Most Navajos—cops included—are killed by other Navajos. What do you think we should do?”
    “Let the tribe handle it. Word of mouth will identify the criminal and then we can take care of it the old way.”
    As her brother took the last fence section to where the others were stacked, Ella met the man’s gaze, wondering what fairy tale he’d just escapedfrom. “I’m Ella Clah of the Navajo Tribal Police. And you are?”
    “Lewis Water,” he said, challenging her by holding the gaze. “What you do has some merit, don’t get me wrong. I learned about meeting force with force in the Guard. But the old ways would work better here than Anglo-type law.”
    “If you’re such a traditionalist, what on earth were you doing in the service?” she asked, intrigued.
    “I was working several jobs trying to save enough money toopen my own trucking firm when I learned about the enlistment bonus the Guard offered. Signing up seemed like a good idea—until one day when the truck I was in hit a roadside bomb. After that, I was shipped stateside. The doctors did as much as they could, but I still lost my leg. That was a year ago. I used all my money to buy a modifiedtruck with hand controls. I have my own company now and, when I raise enough cash, I’ll buy a bigger rig and get that modified, too.”
    She nodded slowly, beginning to understand his distaste for weapons.
    As Clifford joined them, Ella looked over at her brother. “Have you thought any more about the Navajo code the police informant sent me?” Ella had come up with a plan. The way she’d figured it,if she asked Lewis directly, he’d probably refuse to help her. But if she got him interested before he even realized that she needed his help, she’d have a better chance.
    Clifford nodded, then guessing her plan, added, “I suspect it’s a code where symbols are used to designate real things—a bit like the one our Codetalkers used in World War Two. They spoke in Navajo and assigned Navajo namesfor things like tanks, artillery, and so on. I think they gave the Navajo word for turtle to signify a tank—stuff like that. It’s the reason the code couldn’t be broken—except by another Navajo who was acquainted with the language and strategy.”
    “My great-grandfather was a Codetalker. We’d talk about his service now and then. Maybe I can help,” Lewis said. Curiosity flickered in his eyes, andhis voice had lost its attitude.
    Ella had the papers folded