A wasteland of strangers by Bill Pronzini

it came to taking one for his wife, particularly if he happened to be an appointed member of the white power structure and she happened to be the daughter of an uppity free spirit who'd had the gall to buy a piece of nonreservation land and build a home on it in their midst, well, that just wasn't acceptable. No sir, not acceptable at all.
    Screw them, I thought. I don't care that much about the frigging job, and Audrey being Pomo has nothing one way or another to do with my feelings toward her. Do / think Native Americans or any other nonwhite race is inferior? Hell, no. I treat everybody as an individual, some good, some bad, whites or blacks or reds or browns. If I wanted to marry Audrey I'd damned well marry her. I'm—
    What?
    What the hell am I?
    What do I want?
    Mack whined and nuzzled my leg. My head was pounding, the ache sharp behind my eyes as I reached down to pat him.
    And that was when the telephone rang.

    Audrey Sixkiller
    SOMEONE WAS TRYING to break into my house.
    I knew it as soon as I came awake. I'm a light sleeper, but I don't wake up to normal night sounds, even loud ones. I lay very still, listening. The wind, the flutter of a loose shingle on the roof, and then the sound that wasn't normal—a slow scraping, faint and stealthy. Where? Somewhere in back. It came again, followed by a different noise that might have been metal slipping on metal and digging into wood. The back porch, either the window there or the rear door: some kind of tool being used to force the lock on one or the other.
    It made me angry, not afraid. In the heavy darkness I lifted my legs out from under the covers, sat up, slid open the nightstand drawer. Whoever was out there must be white; Indians know how to function in complete silence even in the dead of night. Just as I'd kept William Sixkiller's house and boat, I'd kept his hunting rifle and shotgun and handgun. I lifted the .32 Ruger automatic out of the drawer, eased off the safety with my thumb. Its clip was always kept fully loaded; he'd taught me that when he'd taught me how to shoot.
    Scrape. Scrape.
    Up from the bed with the gun cold in my fingers. The sleep was out of my eyes now; I could make out the familiar bedroom shapes as I crept across it and into the hall.
    Snap!
    I knew that sound: the push-button lock on the back door releasing. I'd been foolish not to listen to Dick and have a dead-bolt lock installed instead.
    Down the hall to the kitchen. Into the kitchen. I keep the swing door that leads to the enclosed porch propped open; it's easier that way to carry in groceries, laundry back and forth to the washer and dryer. Through the opening I could tell that the prowler had the back door pulled all the way open, but I couldn't see him clearly; he was behind the screen door and the cloudy night at his back was only a shade or two lighter than he was. Big, that much I could make out: He filled the doorway. Otherwise he was a shapeless mass of black.
    He was pushing on the screen door; I heard it and the eye hook creak. Not trying to break the hook loose from the wood—that would've made too much noise—but creating a slit at the jamb so he could wedge something through to lift the hook free. More scraping, metal on metal, as I detoured around the dinette table, past the stove to the open swing door. My bare feet made the softest of whispers on the cold linoleum. But he wouldn't have heard me in any case because of the sounds he was making.
    It would have been easy to reach through the doorway, around to the porch light switch. But if I did that, with my eyes dilated as they were, the sudden flare would half blind me for two or three seconds; and if the light triggered him to break through instead of run away, he might have enough time to overpower me before I could get off a shot to stop him. I would shoot him only as a last resort. So I braced my left shoulder against the door edge, spread my feet, extended the automatic in a two-handed grip. It was steadied and