Page 101 of Coyote

Joe stopped wiping. "She's yours. You stole her fair."

"She was his. I don't want anything that was his except for what I've got." His shoulder brushed warm past mine. "Your hands are all over her, anyway. Build her into something else."

He stopped in the doorway on his way out, light behind him.

"I was wrong about you," he said.

Joe looked at the frame on the stand for a second, then at him. "Yeah," he said. "I figured that's what this was."

"She'll be blue!" Joe called after us.

"She'll be ugly!" Coyote called back.

By noon the sun had found the back of my neck, and Winston's cruiser came up the drive and stopped without him cutting the engine. Rafe and I came down the steps to his window. Coyote perched on the porch rail behind us, so still that the only thing telling me he was there was one scuff of his boot heel.

"County's wrapping it up," Winston said through the open window. "A man walks barefoot at night across his own hunting ground, and the wildlife takes care of the rest. The file practically writes itself. Nobody's going to read it twice." He slid his sunglasses down. "The rest of his boys scattered before we got there. Left the pens standing open. All of them."

"Was anyone in them?" I said.

"Two." He kept his eyes forward when he said it. "Half starved. My deputies drove them to county the same way we've done everything else out here, which is to say quiet and without a lot of paperwork. Nobody's come asking after them yet."

"When they're discharged, send them here," I said. "There's a bed and a doctor, and nobody takes a name."

"I figured you'd say that." He put his elbow on the sill. "Listen to me, Doc. That file closes because everybody who could open it has a reason not to. My deputies counted twenty-eight folding chairs out in that yard. Every one of those seats paid cash to sit at an illegal blood sport, and not one of those people is going to volunteer where they were. As for the state of the deceased, there wasn't enough left of his hand or his mouth or his throat to argue with after the coyotes and the crows and three days of that sun. Boys found his clothes out at the pass, which fits a man who'd been drinking."

Behind me the rail creaked once. I kept my eyes on Winston's sunglasses and my hands loose at my sides.

"You need anything else from us?" Rafe asked at my shoulder.

"A quiet year would be something. I've stopped expecting one." He put the truck in gear, then stopped, eyes finding mine again. "Doc. The clinic. You licensed for this county?"

"I'm licensed in the state."

"Good. Because my deputies have big mouths, and they know where you are now, and there's a whole stretch of nothing east of here where folks are an hour from a hospital on a good day." He pushed the glasses back up. "So you know what you've signed yourself up for."

His dust drifted back over us, gritting between my teeth, sour with exhaust. Rafe put his glasses on and studied me.

"He called the house this morning," Rafe said. "The pass got folded into a robbery gone wrong, and the Javelinas hauled their own dead out of the cut before they ran. Write me a list. Whatever the clinic needs to actually be a clinic. Don't play nice."

"It's a long list, Rafe."

"The ranch is solvent. Write it."

"Twenty hemostatic packs. To start."

"Then order twenty."

Rafe went up the steps and left me standing in the yard, and a hot sting hit the backs of my eyes so fast I had to fix on the yellow horizon and blink until it passed.

Coyote's shoulder settled against mine. "You're staying," he said, close enough that his breath touched my neck.

"I'm staying."

"I know. I just like hearing the words." He patted my thigh. "Come on. Let's go get Nimue."

Sierra had ridden up with water twice while Coyote's hand was too bad for reins and his feet were too bad for a stirrup. Coyote made him report on it both times.

The saddle creaked under me, and my spine took the jar of every hoofbeat up the arroyo. Three days of wind had swept the trail clean. My stomach tightened anyway at the last stretch, past the place they took him. The bone chimes clicked at the cave mouth.