Coyote Crossing

• Writer - Greg Rucka
• Penciler - Leandro Fernandez
• Colorist - Studio F
• Lettering - Virtual Calligraphy
• Lettering - Rus Wooton
• Cover Art - Leandro Fernandez
• Editor - Axel Alonso
• Editor - Warren Simons
• Editor in Chief - Joe Quesada

Summary

  Nestor, Angel, and Cassie are tending to the baby which Logan had brought back with him from Mexico that past night. Nestor offers the baby to Cassie to hold, but she quickly backs off, saying that she doesn't do babies. As Nestor tends to the baby, he tells Cassie to talk with Logan, who seemed torn and lost in thought.

  Back at Logan's room, Cassie asks Logan whether he wanted to tell her what happened with Rojas, and whether he had killed her. Logan asks whether she thought he did. After a moment of silence, Logan asks why Cassie would not stop following him. Cassie tells him that she doesn't even know why, but she is fascinated about Logan because she's never seen anyone like him before, and wanted to find out what kind of man he used to be. Logan replies that he was "...not much of a man at all." Again, Cassie asks him what happened with Rojas and whether he killed her. Finally, Logan tells her what happened: how he had returned and discovered Rojas still in labor, about twenty hours after he had left her. He said he tried to help her. The baby came, and she died. He felt guilt about it because he had killed all her guards, so no one was there to help her. Therefore, to him, he felt he indirectly killed her, which made him not much of a man to begin with. More silence, then Cassie leaves. As she leaves, she questions Logan's own self-conflict about whether he was a man or beast, and why he even was questioning it to begin with. She points out the fact that he had went back there to save the life of an innocent. Angrily, she tells him that she had "no time for animals", and that when he finally decides that he is a man, he would know where to find her.

  Later that night, Logan walks past Nestor, who asks Logan what they were going to do with the baby. Nestor turns down Logan's suggestion that Nestor and his family raised the baby as their own, since they already had three children of their own already. Logan says he wouldn't raise the baby since he knows he's incapable of doing so. Nestor thinks that there was no other resort but to give the baby to the state. It was an option that Logan couldn't accept, so he was left to debate what to do with the baby.

  Returning back to the Rojas mansion the next day, Logan notices looters were working their way through the mansion, taking anything that they could get their hands on since Rojas was now dead. After a brief conflict with a looter in Rojas' master bedroom, Logan finds an old family portrait of Rojas, her father, and her younger sister. Behind the photo was an envelope with an address, sent from Rojas' younger sister who was living in Illinois. Logan brings the envelope and photo back to Nestor's place, and tells Nestor that he is thinking of talking to Rojas' sister, Maria, to adopt the baby. If she doesn't adopt the baby, then Logan had no other ideas.

  Days later, where Logan shows up at Maria's residence. Seeing that Maria and her family had just left for a trip, Logan breaks into her home to look around. He sees family photographs of a loving, stable family. Soon, the family returns, and Logan sneaks back out. He meets Maria to tell her the bad news about her sister. Logan asked her whether she knew how Rojas made her money. Maria tells him that he did, and that Rojas used to send her cashier's checks, but she never cashed them, nor did she ever send them back. She wouldn't send them back because Rojas would never take no for an answer. She asks Logan how Rojas died; he tells her that she died giving birth, leaving Maria speechless. Logan tells her that Maria now has a niece, but her niece would end up in a foster home unless someone in Rojas' family stepped up to claim the baby. Logan offers Maria a chance to adopt the baby, one who was innocent of whatever bad deeds Rojas had committed, one who needed a family to love her. Logan suggests that Maria could use the money that Rojas had sent to Maria to good use. Left with a tough decision, Maria tells Logan that she had to speak to her family about it.

  Some time later, back in El Paso, as we see Logan's motorcycle and Maria's SUV parked in front of the bar. Maria, her husband, and her two children are introduced to Maria's niece. Maria decides to name the baby Angelica, after her mother. As the family, now with the baby, loads up their car and drive back to their home, Nestor tells Logan that he had did the right thing, "what a man would do."

  Much later, in a rainy night in Oregon, Logan knocks on the door to Cassie's home. Cassie opens, and invites Logan in.

Summary

  "Coyote Crossing" concludes in Wolverine #11, with a rather odd ending. Logan has returned to Mexico to deal with Rojas, only to find that after he scared away (or killed) all of her guards, she's died in childbirth. So he takes the kid and proceeds to angst about the whole thing.

  There seems to be some suggestion that Wolverine is okay with killing people in combat, where he can rationalise it as death in the heat of action, but that he's much less comfortable with the idea of having caused somebody a slow and lingering death through indirect means. If that's the idea, then I can see where Rucka is coming from. It plays into the idea Rucka's trying to explore, that Wolverine rationalises his animal kills away but can't deal with this in quite the same manner.

  Somehow, though, it doesn't quite ring true. The whole set-up seems a little too contrived, with the air of a particularly artificial ethics problem. And then there's the damn newborn, which finds itself cast as the obvious metaphor for untainted innocence. There are interesting ideas in here, but the story misses the mark.

  On the plus side, though, there's the usual excellent artwork from Leandro Fernandez, and I'm still enjoying the Cassie Lathrop subplot. The ideas in this series are good, but somehow they're not quite translating into a stand-out plot.

  Rating: B-