Page 4 of Coyote

"Where's your mamma now?"

His fingers tightened around the empty coffee cup. "She went down into the arroyo. The water came up fast, and she didn't come back out."

My hands stopped. "I'm sorry, Percy."

He picked up the last piece of burrito and held it tight. But he left the knife on my table.

When he'd finished, I showed him the room off the wash porch. It had a cot, a clean sheet, a wool blanket folded at the foot, and a door that locked from the inside.

"This room is yours tonight," I said. "Nobody comes through that door without asking. You can lock it against me too. I won't take it personally."

He stood in the doorway without crossing it. He looked at the cot, the ceiling, the one small window, and back into the hall.

"I can't sleep in there. The roof's too close," he said after a moment. "You can't see what's coming through a roof. Mamma said sleep where you can see every way somebody might come at you."

"All right," I said again.

I took the good throw off the couch and the pillow from my side of the bed, carried them out to the porch, and dropped the pillow onto the swing.

"I don't sleep on the floor," I told him. "My back's too old for it. But I'll stay out here until morning."

He watched me settle onto the swing, still looking for the trick.

There wasn't one.

Rafe shut off the light upstairs. Rafe hadn't come out to say goodnight. He'd never once told me no. He'd never once told me yes, either.

A coyote called from the ridge, one long note that broke at the end.

Percy stilled. Then he walked to the edge of the porch, tipped his face toward the sound, and howled back.

It wasn't a good imitation, too high in the middle, breaking at the end. The coyote called again anyway.

Percy answered until he ran out of breath. Then he looked at me, waiting to see what I'd make of it.

"That was loud," I said. "But I've heard worse."

He almost smiled.

Pearl came out and settled on the boards. Percy looked at the rug by the door where the dog usually slept. When I said nothing, he lay down on it and curled around Nimue. Pearl moved close enough for her back to touch his and closed her eyes.

Rafe would want him in the house. Rafe could want that in the morning.

I stayed awake on the swing until sunrise, making sure nothing reached him.

"That one," I told Nimue, before the big man in the pit had even won. "That one's ours."

She cinched tight around my throat, which I took as agreement.

Down in the hole, the man was fighting a boar with his bare hands. It changed nothing. I'd already claimed him. He just didn't know yet.

The Javelinas had fenced off an old drainage basin with chain link and bolted truck hoods on where the chain link ran out. It smelled like pig shit and gasoline and forty guys who'd been drinking since noon. Real class operation. The boar came nearly to the man's hip, a hundred and eighty pounds of bad temper with its tusks filed to points because God's version wasn't stabby enough. The man outweighed it, but not by enough to make the tusks harmless. He was bleeding, and an iron cuff around one ankle ran back to a chain bolted into the dirt. The chain was long enough to let him cross the pit, but too short to let him reach the fence or any of the men above it.

One guy ran the show, and he wasn't hard to find. The others orbited him like he had his own weather. The money went into his hand and nobody else's. He wore a string of filed boar tusks around his neck and kept touching them while he watched, petting them like he'd earned them instead of shooting something in a pen that couldn't run.

One of the men beside him called him Zaroff. I wondered if he'd picked the name himself.

The boar came at the big man low, head down. He should have moved. He planted his feet instead and took the charge into his chest. It drove him back hard enough to snap the chain straight. One tusk opened his forearm. He caught the animal behind the jaw and shoulder, turned with it, and used the rest of its charge to drive its head into one of the truck hoods bolted around the pit.