Coyote Waits is a crime novel by American writer Tony Hillerman, the tenth in the Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee Navajo Tribal Police series, first 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.