Coyotes

Coyotes are the animals Eli Wyms believed he was shooting at during a nighttime standoff, and that belief becomes a point of dispute in the legal account of his actions. They have no independently established presence in the incident: their role is conveyed through Wyms’s frightened perception and through Mickey Haller’s defense argument about what Wyms intended to hit.

Wyms’s Perception in the Dark

Wyms told the negotiator that noises in the darkness frightened him. He believed rabid Coyotes wanted to eat him and said that he could see their red eyes glowing. In his account, the animals explain why he began firing and why he shot out the spotlight on the first patrol car to arrive: he feared its light would reveal his position to them.

That explanation came amid a prolonged, heavily armed standoff. Wyms fired repeatedly while deputies were present, and investigators later collected ninety-four spent casings. The account records his fear of Coyotes as his own explanation for the shooting, not as confirmation that animals were there.

The Defense Argument

Mickey Haller used Wyms’s stated fear to distinguish between shooting at the patrol car’s light and shooting into the occupied vehicle. He argued that Wyms, described in the state’s documents as an expert marksman, could have hit the deputy if that had been his aim, but had not done so. The prosecutor countered that Wyms had left the army fifteen years earlier; Haller replied that some skills remained.

Coyotes therefore matter to the case not as verified participants in the standoff but as part of the contested account of intention. Wyms’s belief supplies a reason for firing at the light, while the state’s emphasis on shots at an occupied sheriff’s car keeps the danger to the deputy in view.

Narrative Function

The episode gives Coyotes a sharply limited but consequential presence: they are perceived as predators in Wyms’s fearful account, then invoked in court as context for interpreting his conduct. The gap between that perception and what the evidence establishes keeps the animals from becoming independent actors in the narrative. Instead, they expose how the same shooting can be framed either through the threat Wyms believed he faced or through the danger his gunfire posed to the deputies.