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So how did you outsmart me, wise guy?”
    “When you went to the phone you took along Bisti, but you left his sack behind.”
    Janet digested this. She walked toward him, shaking her head.
    “You searched through his stuff,” she said, accusingly. “Is that what you’re telling me? That’s not outslicking me. That’s cheating.”
    They were walking again, Chee still grinning. His hand hurt a little, and so did the burn on his chest, but he was enjoying this. He was happy.
    “Whose rules?” he asked. “You’re a lawyer so you have to play by the
biligaana
rules. But you didn’t ask me what rules I was using.”
    Janet laughed. “Okay, Jim,” she said. “Anyway, I got Old Man Bisti out of jail and out of your unfair clutches.”
    “You enjoyed that job, didn’t you? I mean your work out on the Big Rez? Why don’t you go back to it? They’re short-handed. I’ll bet you could get your job back in a minute.”
    “I am going back to it.”
    “With the DNA?” Chee’s delight was in his voice. The Dinebeiina Nahiilna be Agaditahe was the Navajo Tribe’s version of a legal aid society — providing legal counsel for those who couldn’t afford to pay. He’d be seeing Janet Pete a lot.
    “Same sort of work but not the DNA,” she said. “I’ll be working for the Department of Justice. With the Federal Public Defender here in Albuquerque. I’ll be one of the court-appointed defense attorneys in federal criminal cases.”
    “Oh,” Chee said. His quick mind formed two conclusions. Janet Pete, being Navajo and being the most junior lawyer on the staff, would have been given Ashie Pinto to represent. From that conclusion, the second was instantaneous and took the joy from the morning. Janet Pete had come to see Officer Jim Chee, not Friend Jim Chee.
    “I went to school here, you know,” Chee said, simply to have something to say, to cover his disappointment.
    They were walking under the sycamores that shaded the great brick expanse of the central mall. A squadron of teenaged skateboarders thundered past. Janet Pete glanced at him, curious about the change of subject and the sudden silence which had preceded it.
    “After four years,” she said, “a campus starts to feel like home.”
    “Seven for me,” Chee said. “You go a couple of semesters and then run out of money, and come back again when you’ve stacked some up again. That’s the average here, I think. About seven years to get a bachelor’s degree. But it never started to feel like home.”
    “It was different at Stanford,” Janet said. “People either had money or they had the big scholarships. You lived around the campus, so you got acquainted, made friends. It’s more a community, I guess.” She glanced at him again. “What’s wrong?”
    “Nothing. Everything’s fine.”
    “Your mood changed. A cloud over the sun.”
    “I shifted from the social mode into strictly business,” Chee said.
    “Oh?” Puzzlement in her voice.
    “You’re representing Ashie Pinto. Right?” The tone was a little bleaker than he’d intended.
    They walked past the Student Union without an answer to that, toward the fountain formed of a great slab of natural stone. Chee remembered the local legend that the university architect, lacking funds for an intended sculpture, had scrounged the monolithic sheets of rough marble from a quarry and arranged them in something that might suggest Stonehenge, or raw nature, or whatever your imagination allowed. It worked beautifully and usually it lifted Chee’s spirits.
    “I came to see you because I like you,” Janet Pete said. “If you weren’t my friend, which you happen to be, I would have come looking for you because you’re the arresting officer and it’s my job.”
    Chee thought about that.
    “So I had two reasons,” she said. “Is that one too many reasons for you?”
    “What did I say?” Chee asked. “I didn’t say anything.”
    “Hell you didn’t. Then why am I feeling like I’m on the