Page 72 of Coyote

His feet were bare, and ruined. I crouched and examined them: torn pads, split heels, cholla spines driven in deep and snapped off level with the skin, and he'd walked on all of it long after. My own soles ached in sympathy.

"He was scared," Fenix said, and I looked up. The kid was staring straight at the body, head cocked, but he wasn't seeing it. He was somewhere else. "He was so scared."

"Hush, birdie." Linc's horse shifted under him.

John lowered himself over the body, set Sierra's kit on the dirt beside him, and pulled on gloves before he touched anything. He laid two fingers against the throat and watched the chest, and he held them there a long moment. "Definitely dead. Cold, too, so he's been that way a while. Looks dehydrated."

"He ran," I said, and pointed to the soles of his feet. Most of the barbs were in the front part, which meant he'd been moving fast.

John moved the flashlight down the body and stopped above the chest wound without touching it. "One wound I can see, and it's the exit. If the entry's in his back with no soot and no stippling around it, he was shot from behind while he ran, and from a good distance. I'll say that when I've turned him."

He eased the collar back into place. "And the blood settled while he lay flat on his back, and it's fixed now."

"They killed him somewhere else and carried him here for us to find," I said.

John's hands left the collar and there it was: a hole through the cloth at the dead man's shoulder, and wired through it, drilled at the root, a boar tusk, filed to a point, the wire ends twisted shut.

There was a second thing on that wire. Smaller, tucked up under the fold of the collar where the cloth had bunched: another tusk, half the size, and strung between the two of them, drilled through the root with the same care, a tooth. A coyote's canine.

Nimue drew tight at my throat. I put two fingers on her and made my shoulders drop, and with my other hand I laid the collar back down over the tooth and left it lying there.

"This was Zaroff," I said.

John looked at the tusk for a long time without touching it. "His people, probably."

I shook my head. "No, this was him personally." I stood and looked down the fence line toward the service road, and wanted to follow those treads.

I put the story together without trying to. The man running across the open desert, barefoot and scared. I knew that run from the inside. Zaroff would've given him a head start. More sporting that way. And then, when he got tired of chasing…

The radio hissed once. "Ransom is already riding to you," Rafe said. "I want both of you back here now."

Ransom loped up the fence line with his rifle balanced across the pommel before the sun sat full above the horizon, looked at the dead man, looked at the two of us, and made no remark. He stepped down, set a boot on the bottom wire, and stayed there until dust came up off the service road.

He was off it before the cruiser stopped rolling. Winston got out with his hat already on, and his hand went straight to the back of Ransom's neck and stayed.

"Mornin', darlin'."

Whatever Ransom said back was too low for me. His hand flattened on Winston's chest, the band on it bright in the new sun.

We left them to it, with Linc and Fenix to deal with the body, and we rode for the house.

John rode loose and quiet most of the way back, eyes on the middle distance, his right hand on his thigh along the line where a rifle would lie if he carried one.

Sarah stood in the kitchen washing dishes and frowned at us as we walked through.

"Where's Sierra?" I asked.

"Back office." She jerked her head toward Rafe's office. "Said there was a body found. Anybody else hurt?"

"No," John said. "He wasn't one of ours. Nobody was hurt. It was more a warning than anything else, but you stay away from the windows today."

She nodded. "Sierra's got coffee in the office for everyone," she said as John kissed her cheek. I didn't like watching him do that, but I wasn't going to stop him. It just meant he owed me two kisses for every one he gave her.

In the office, Rafe sat with his reading glasses low on his nose and his braid over one shoulder. Cruz and Mateo took the two chairs nearest the door, and Joe filled his usual seat across from me, his hands flat on the wood, engine black worked so deep into the knuckle creases that no soap ever lifted all of it. Winston was there with his hat and badge on and looking annoyed that he had to be. Sierra went around the table with the pot and filled every cup.

"It's the fox again," Cruz said. "Right? A message, same as the fox, so maybe it's the same guys who—"

"Cruz," Rafe said, and Cruz stopped.