Read Online Coyote Waits by Tony Hillerman - Free Book Online Page B

came up with a Coca-Cola glass and filled it carefully up to the trademark by the label. That done, he sat again, put the bottle on the floor beside him, and rocked.
    “I didn’t offer Hosteen Pinto a drink. I remember that. Wouldn’t be the thing to do, him being alcoholic. But I poured myself one, and sat here and sipped at it.” McGinnis sipped his bourbon, thinking.
    “I read the letter to him and he said something strong.” McGinnis examined his memory. “Strong. I think he called Tagert a coyote, and that’s about as strong as a Navajo will get. And at first he wasn’t going to work for him. I remember that. Then he said something like Tagert paid good. And that’s what had brought him in here in the first place. Money. You notice that belt out in the pawn case?”
    McGinnis pushed himself out of the rocker and disappeared through the doorway into the store.
    Leaphorn looked at Bourebonette. “I’ll tell the FBI about Tagert,” he said.
    “You think they’ll do anything?”
    “They should,” he said. But maybe they wouldn’t. Why would they? Their case was already made. And what difference did it make anyway?
    McGinnis reappeared carrying a concha belt. The overhead light reflected dimly off the tarnished silver.
    “This was always old Pinto’s fallback piece. The last thing he pawned when he was running low.” McGinnis’s gnarled hand stroked the silver disks. “It’s a dandy.”
    He handed it to Professor Bourebonette.
    Leaphorn could see it was indeed a dandy. An old, heavy one made of the turn-of-the-century silver Mexican five-peso pieces. Worth maybe two thousand dollars from a collector. Worth maybe four hundred in pawn credit.
    “Trouble is he’d already pawned it,” McGinnis said. “Not only pawned it. He’d been in twice to bump up the loan. He wanted another fifty dollars in groceries on it and we was jawing about that when the mail truck came up.”
    McGinnis was rocking while he remembered, holding the Coca-Cola glass in left hand, tilting it back and forth in compensation for the rocking motion. Exactly as he’d seen him do it when Leaphorn was twenty years younger, coming in here to learn where families had moved, to collect gossip, just to talk. Leaphorn felt a dizzying sense of dislocation in time. Everything was the same. As if twenty years hadn’t ticked away. The cluttered old room, the musty smell, the yellow light, the old man grown older, as if in the blink of an eye. Suddenly he knew just what McGinnis would do next, and McGinnis did it.
    He leaned, picked up the Old Crow bottle by the neck, and carefully recharged his glass, dripping the last of the recharge until it was exactly up to the trademark.
    “I’ve seen Pinto poor before. Many times. But that day he was totally tapped out. Said he was out of coffee and cornmeal and lard and just about everything and Mary wasn’t in any shape to help him with her own bunch to feed.”
    McGinnis fell silent, rocking, tasting the whiskey on his tongue.
    “So he took the job,” Professor Bourebonette said.
    “So he did,” McGinnis said. “Had me write Tagert right back.” He took another tiny sip, and savored it in a silence that made the creaking of his rocker seem loud.
    A question hung in Leaphorn’s mind:
Why had Pinto called Tagert a coyote
? It was a hard, hard insult among the Navajos — implying not just bad conduct but the evil of malice. Mary Keeyani said Tagert had given him whiskey. Would that be the reason? Leaphorn noticed his interest in this affair growing.
    “But I know he didn’t want to,” McGinnis added. “I said, What’s wrong with this fella? He looks all right to me. He pays you good money, don’t he? He’s just another one of them professors. And old Ashie said Tagert wants me to do something I don’t want to do. And I said what’s that, and he said he wants me to find something for him. And I said well hell, you do that all the time, and he was quiet a while. And then he said, you