SECOND STRIKE (Copperhead MC #2)

Chapter One · Sienna

CHAPTER ONE

SIENNA

The call came in as a fall from standing, which is what people in Blackthorn County say when they do not want to say gunshot.

I was already sitting up. That is the thing nobody warns you about after eleven years on a truck. Your body starts answering before the tones finish, so you spend your whole life running a half second ahead of your own decisions and you never once get to catch up to them.

“Medic Two,” dispatch said, and her voice had the flat sanded quality it got after two in the morning. “Route Eleven northbound, vicinity mile marker one seventy-one. Male, unknown age, fall from standing, caller advises heavy bleeding. Caller is not on scene.”

Not on scene. Somebody had made a phone call from a moving vehicle and then kept driving, and that told me more about what was waiting at mile marker 171 than anything else dispatch was going to say out loud on a channel that half the county scanned for entertainment.

Amos Boyle was pulling his boots on with his eyes still shut. He was twenty-four and had been an EMT for fourteen months and he still slept like it did not cost him anything.

“A fall,” he said. “With heavy bleeding. On Eleven. At two in the morning.”

“Get in the truck.”

The bay door came up in a rattle that I felt in my back teeth.

We had two rigs in Blackthorn County and one of them had been down for six days waiting on a fuel pump that the county would approve on Thursday if I filed the right form, and the form had a signature line for a purchasing officer who had retired in March.

So we had one rig. One rig for four hundred and eleven square miles of ridge and hollow and switchback, and a helicopter out of Roanoke that would not fly tonight because the ceiling was sitting on the mountains like a hand over a mouth.

I drove. I always drive. Amos had a good touch and a good heart and he did not yet know the roads the way you have to know them, which is not by name but by feel, by which curves throw you and which ones hold.

Route 11 north out of the Gap runs up a grade for two miles with the river on the right and the cut bank on the left, and there is no shoulder to speak of and no light at all.

The headlights got about ninety feet and then gave up.

Mist came off the water and hung there in the beams, and I thought, the way you do when you are on the second half of a twenty-four, that there was no version of this where somebody had fallen down.

“Mile marker’s up,” Amos said. “There. There, there is a truck.”

Sixty feet past the mile marker post, a motorcycle lay on its side in the weeds with the front wheel still turned in toward the bank, like something had set it down there and walked off.

No car. No truck. Whoever had made that phone call had done it from a moving vehicle with the windows up, and had watched the whole thing get smaller in the mirror, and I could not even hate them for it, because I knew exactly what the sight of that bike in the grass had told them.

I keyed the mic. “Medic Two on scene at one seventy-one. Advise law enforcement, we have a scene that is not secure.”

“Copy Medic Two. County unit is thirty-one minutes.”

Thirty-one minutes. There was one deputy on shift for the whole northern half of the county and he was somewhere down around Wilkes Ford, and thirty-one minutes was an honest number, which was worse than a dishonest one.

I put the rig at an angle to block the northbound lane and left the lightbar going. “Bag and the trauma kit,” I said. “Stay behind me until I tell you different.”

“Sienna.”

“Amos.”

He got the bag.

The grass was wet to the knee and the ground went out from under you two steps off the gravel. I heard him before I saw him. Not a word, not a yell. A wet catching sound, the kind a person makes when their body has taken over the job of breathing and is doing it badly.

He was on his back in the ditch with one arm flung up over his head like a man asleep in a hard chair.

Twenty-three, maybe. Dark hair, wet with it.

Cut over a hooded sweatshirt, and even in the dark with the flashlight jumping I could read the bottom rocker of that cut from ten feet out, because I had learned to read it before I learned to drive.

BLACKTHORN GAP.

And above it, coiled, mouth open, the copperhead.

“Okay,” I said, and I got down in the mud beside him. “Okay. I’ve got you.”

His eyes came around to me. They were doing that thing where they track but do not land.

“Trip,” I said, because I had put four staples in the back of this boy’s head in the parking lot of the Copperhead clubhouse when he was nineteen years old and prospecting and too proud to go to the emergency room. “Trip, it’s Sienna. Don’t help me. Just lie there.”

Amos got the light on him and I heard the breath go out of my partner in one piece.

The cut was soaked black from the right armpit down to the hem.

There was a hole under the arm, at the fold where the arm meets the chest, and it was small.

That was the first thing wrong with it. It was small and it was clean and there was no burn ring around it and no soot, and a hole that small at that distance from anything meant the round had come from somewhere else entirely.

“Shears,” I said. “Chest seal, both sides, and get me the pressure bag off the hook.”

His breathing had a rhythm now that I did not like at all.

Fast, shallow, and getting faster. I cut the cut off him, which is a thing I had never done in my life and had thought about more than once, and it came away in two pieces and I threw them into the weeds.

Under it his skin was gray in a way that had nothing to do with the flashlight.

Right chest, no air movement. Trachea still midline, but it would not be for long.

“Amos. Fourteen gauge.”

“Second intercostal, mid clavicular?”

“Fifth, anterior axillary, I want the length. Talk to me while I do it.”

He talked. God bless him, he talked, and I do not remember one word of it.

I found the rib with two fingers and went over the top of it and there was that give and then the hiss, that long ugly exhale of a chest letting go of something it had been holding since somebody pulled a trigger a quarter mile away.

His eyes came back. That is the part that gets you. They come back and for one second there is a whole person in there looking at you.

“Sienna,” he said.

“Don’t talk.”

“They shot me.”

“I know it. Don’t talk.”

He talked anyway. They always talk anyway.

“Road was empty.” His mouth was doing more work than his lungs were. “Sienna. Road was empty, I was just stood there.”

“Amos, pressure.”

“Seventy-eight over palp.”

Seventy-eight over nothing at all, and one lung, and a boy telling me the road had been empty, which I already knew, because if the road had not been empty he would have been on his bike and moving and nobody could have put a hole in him with that kind of patience.

“Trip. I need you to shut up and let me have your breathing. That is the whole job. Can you do that.”

He shut up. He was a good kid. He had always been a good kid, which around here has never once been a defense against anything.

We got him packaged in twelve minutes on ground that would not hold a backboard flat, and I was cinching the last strap when I heard the bikes come up the grade.

Amos went stiff. “Sienna.”

“Keep working.”

Three of them. They came around the pull off and stopped in a line and the engines went down one at a time and the sound of the river came back in underneath.

Boots in gravel. Boots in wet grass. And I did not look up, because I had one hand on a boy’s neck holding his airway where I wanted it and because I had spent ten years building a life in which I did not look up when I heard that particular sound.

“Trip.” A voice above me. “Trip.”

“He’s alive,” I said. “Get out of my light.”

There was a pause of about a second and a half. It was the longest one I had lived through in a while.

Then the light moved.

“Rook, get up the road and wave the deputy in when he comes, county’s thirty minutes out. Scout, nobody touches the bikes or that pull-off, the sheriff’s office is going to want this scene.” A beat. “Ma’am. What do you need.”

Ma’am.

I looked up.

Cutter Reeves was crouched on the other side of the boy with his forearms on his knees, and the flashlight was low and off my hands the way I had asked, and he was looking at me like a man looking at a door he had walked past every day for a decade.

He had gray at the temple now. That was new.

His face had gone from hard to carved somewhere in the last ten years and there was a scar across the bridge of his nose that had not been there when I knew every square inch of him.

Forty years old. Vice President of the Copperhead Motorcycle Club, which since last November is a fact printed on a public charter list in a lawyer’s office, because this club decided to be the first one in America with nothing to hide, and the county is still deciding what to do about it.

“I need you at his feet,” I said. “When I say lift, you lift, and you do it slow, and you do not stop halfway because your back hurts. And when we get to the truck you do not get in the truck.”

“All right.”

“I’m not finished. He has a hole in his chest and one lung and I have a forty-one minute drive to Roanoke. If your friends follow me up Eleven at ninety miles an hour I will pull over and stop, and every minute I am stopped is a minute he does not have. Do you understand what I am telling you.”

Something happened in his face. It was small and it was fast and I hated that I could still see it.

“Yeah,” he said. “I understand.”

“Then lift.”

He lifted.

We got Trip up the bank and into the rig, and Amos got the second line in on the first stick, which he had been trying to do for fourteen months, and I did not have the room in my chest right then to tell him so.

I hung the blood expander. I got the monitor on.

Pressure was seventy-eight over palp and the number on the pulse ox was a lie because his fingers were cold, and I thought about the ceiling sitting down on the mountains and the helicopter that was not coming and the forty-one minutes.

Cutter stood at the open back doors with his hands at his sides.

“Sienna.”

“Don’t.”

“Is he going to make it.”

I should have said the thing you say. There is a script for it and I have used it a thousand times, in kitchens and on shoulders and in the parking lots of churches, and it is a kind one and it costs nothing.

“He’s twenty-three and his heart is strong and I have got a hole plugged and a lung up,” I said. “That is everything I have. Ask me again in an hour.”

He nodded. He did not argue and he did not follow and he did not touch the door.

“Thank you,” he said.

That was the part I could not take. Not the blood, not the boy, not the cut lying in the weeds with the snake on it. He said thank you in a low even voice like a man who had practiced it, and I felt the whole ten years go through me at once like a cold wire.

I pulled the doors shut in his face.

Forty-one minutes to Roanoke. Amos worked the bag and called out numbers and I took the switchbacks at a speed that would have gotten me fired anywhere with more than one ambulance in it.

Mile after mile of black trees and the river going the other way, and the radio traffic thin and useless, and in the back of my head a running tally that I could not turn off: one rig, six days, a fuel pump, a signature line, a helicopter that would not fly, and a county of eleven thousand people spread over four hundred and eleven square miles of mountain who had exactly me.

I made it in thirty-four and I did not look in the mirror once, and there were no headlights in it anyway, because he had told them not to and they had not.

At four fifteen in the morning I stood in the ambulance bay at Carilion with my gloves in a red bag and my forearms streaked to the elbow and the sky just barely starting to think about it, and I did the thing I do, which is walk the call backward.

Small entry. High and tight in the axilla, under the arm, which is a hole that is only there if the arm is up. Long path, down and back, and the exit low on the posterior chest and bigger than the entry by a factor of four. No burn, no soot, no stippling.

Not a pistol. Not a fight in a parking lot. Not a robbery on a dark road.

I stood there with the sodium lights buzzing over me and I put it together the way you put together a wreck from the skid marks.

He had been standing beside his bike with his arm up. Reaching for the mirror, maybe, or lighting a smoke, or waving somebody past. And the round had come across the road and down, from the cut bank, from the high side, from a couple hundred yards out where the pines start.

Somebody had lain in wet pine needles above Route 11 at one o’clock in the morning with a rifle and a rest and a good enough scope, and had waited, and had picked which of them to take.

That is not a thing you do because you are angry.

That is a thing you do because it is your job.

I got my phone out and I stood there for a long time with my thumb over a number I had not called in ten years and had never once deleted, and in the end I put it back in my pocket and I got in the truck and I drove home.