Coyote Waits

Coyote Waits is the tenth crime fiction novel in the Joe Leaphorn / Jim Chee Navajo Tribal Police series by Tony Hillerman published in 1990.

It was adapted for television by PBS in 2003.

Chee is slow to go to the aid of another officer, Nez, who radios that he has found the person doing spray-paint vandalism on rock formations. Chee gets burned pulling Nez from his burning police vehicle. Leaphorn is brought into the case by two women, one the niece of and the other a professor who interviews Ashie Pinto, the main suspect. Ambitious historians and a Vietnamese family resettled in the US after the Vietnam War are intertwined in the crimes committed, as Chee and Leaphorn work together, sometimes going to places considered taboo by Navajo culture.

Plot summary

Officers Chee and Nez agree to meet at Red Rock trading post for a break from patrol. Chee hears Nez laughing on the radio about seeing the person who has been defacing local rock formations with paint, so takes his break. Chee realizes he should be with Nez. He passes one vehicle en route to finding Nez in his burning patrol car. Chee uses the fire extinguisher and then pulls Nez out of the still-burning car. Chee is severely burned and Nez is dead from a gunshot, as well as burned. Chee finds Hosteen Ashie Pinto walking on the road, holding an expensive bottle of brandy, and a gun recently shot; he is drunk and says he is ashamed, in Navajo. Chee arrests him.