15. Fourteen
I couldn't make Sierra's medical kit hold enough.
I sat on the equipment shed step with the kit open across my knees and counted suture packs into the lid for the second time that morning.
My ribs pulled when I bent for the gauze at the bottom of the crate.
Since the dead man on the east track, every count had run short: not enough hemostatic packs, not enough tubing, no whole blood at all except what walked around this ranch inside its owners' veins.
I closed the lid, let the latch catch, and opened it again.
Coyote crouched in the shade at the corner of the shed, drawing a whetstone down his knife in long, even strokes.
He had planted himself there every morning since the body, between me and the open yard.
Across the yard, Sarah hung wash on Sierra's line, a chore she'd claimed for her own, her gray cardigan pinned between two of my shirts.
The radio on the step crackled. "Doc." Cruz's voice ran high and fast. "East wire, by the county gate. There's a man on the wire. He's alive. Doc, he's shot."
I was on my feet with the kit latched before he finished talking.
Joe rolled out from under Linc's truck at the sound and had the flatbed running by the time I crossed the yard to it.
Coyote vaulted into the bed behind me, and I braced my boots against the wheel well and held the kit against my chest while Joe drove us east. Every rut landed in my ribs.
Cruz and Mateo sat on their horses fifty feet back from the fence with their rifles out, exactly as they'd been taught. Past them, a man hung on the fence wire.
He had made it halfway over before his strength quit.
The top strand held him folded at the waist, arms down the far side, one boot hooked in the second strand, and a dark stain had spread down his left trouser leg and dried and spread again, wet at the center.
Even folded over the wire, he looked young, twenty or twenty-two, with a boy's thin neck under a week of dirt.
Coyote dropped out of the bed before Joe finished braking.
"Wait," he told me. "Ground first."
I didn't like it, but I waited. If the man had made it this long without medical attention, another few minutes was unlikely to be fatal.
Coyote circled wide with his eyes down, cut the line of the county road, and worked back along the man's trail. It didn't take him long.
"One man," he said. "On foot since the culvert, and falling.
He fell there and there." He pointed at two places in the dirt that told me nothing.
"Nobody walked with him, and nobody pushed him.
Nothing was waiting in the culvert. He's alone.
" He looked at the man on the wire, and his mouth flattened. "He's wearing their colors."
"Then he's a patient wearing their colors." I was already moving. "Help me take him down."
The leather vest across the man's back carried the boar patch, and fever heat rolled off him before I even reached the wound. Coyote unhooked the boot and took the legs. I took him under the arms, and the lift pulled at every stitch in my side. We laid him flat in the grass on the Pae Saco side.
Cruz let his horse drift closer before he caught himself, looking at the blood. "Doc, is he—"
"Alive," I said. "Hand me your canteen, and then get back where Mateo can see you."
I reached for my shears, and Coyote's arm came down between me and the wound.
"Not yet," he said, and searched him first. He cut the vest off in two strokes and quartered it along the seams, running his thumbs down every edge of the leather.
He pulled the boots and checked the heels and the linings, emptied the pockets into the grass, turning each thing over once.
He took a folding knife off the man's belt and put it in his own. Then he nodded.
I cut the trouser leg away from the stain.
The entry wound sat on the outside of the left thigh, midway up, at least a day old, rimmed black and angry, and the exit sat forward of it through the same muscle, ragged and weeping.
The leg lay straight and took my grip without grating, so the bone had been missed.
The pulse at his ankle beat strong and even, and his toes moved when I told him to move them.
The bullet had taken muscle and nothing else, and the walking had ground the infection deep into what was left.
The infection was the fight now, and dehydration was helping the infection.
His eyes opened while I packed the exit wound. "Doc," he said.
I recognized him then. The face meant nothing to me, gray and fever-slack, but I knew that voice. For five months, a boy had pushed a water jug through the wire of Zaroff's pen every night after the crowds cleared and the lights died.
"Miguel," he said, as if I'd asked. "It's Miguel."
"Miguel." I kept packing. "You're on Pae Saco land. The bullet went through the muscle of your thigh and missed the bone and the artery. The wound's infected and you're dried out, but you're going to live. Do you understand me?"
His head rolled to the side, and he went back under without answering.
Loading him, Coyote took the shoulders away from me and left me the legs, and when Miguel lay flat in the bed, Coyote pressed his hand against my side, over the shirt, over the stitches. He held it there and looked up at me.
"I know," I said.
He took his hand back and cleared the tailgate.
We ran him back to the house in the flatbed with my knees braced on either side of him and two fingers on his throat.
His pulse tapped fast and thin the whole ride.
Coyote crouched at the tailgate with his eyes on the fence line, and Nimue held still at his collar with her head raised into the wind.
In the yard, Rafe stood waiting with Sierra.
Sierra had already dragged the cot from the wash porch room out where I could see it through the door, sheets on, a stack of towels at the foot.
Rafe looked at the boy, then at me.
"He's the one who brought me water in the pit," I said. "He's been shot for a day or more and walked most of it."
Rafe took his glasses off. "He'll know something useful. Keep him alive if you can so we can learn what it is."
We carried Miguel through to the cot. Cruz hovered at the door with his hands working in and out of his pockets until I gave them something to do, and then he held the light steady and asked his question anyway.
"He's one of them, Doc. Why are we fixing him?"
"He's shot and I'm a doctor." I cut the rest of the trouser leg away. "That's the whole list of facts I need. Hold the light on the wound, not on his face."
Sierra worked across the cot from me without being asked, laying out shears, irrigation, and dressing packs on a towel in the sequence I'd want them.
Sarah brought water from the kitchen, hot and then cool, set both basins where Sierra pointed, and stood back against the wall out of the way.
Her arms stayed folded. She watched my hands the whole time and said nothing at all.
The wound track needed opening, not closing.
I ran lidocaine in a ring around both wounds, from the vials Winston had picked up in town against my list, and waited for the sting to leave Miguel's face before I touched anything else.
Then I opened the track, cut away what the walking had killed, and flushed it with saline from the veterinary stock in the barn refrigerator until the water ran clear.
I packed it loosely and left it open to drain.
Closing it would seal the infection in; open, it could be stitched in three or four days if it stayed clean.
Miguel twisted the sheet in both fists and dug his good heel into the cot. He cursed once, softly, in Spanish, and that was it. Sierra ran a line into his arm while I worked, and I started the antibiotics from the same pharmacy bag.
Miguel talked while I worked on him. It was fever talk at first, slurred and circling, and then, as the fluids ran in and his pressure climbed, it turned into real talk that arrived in pieces between the places where my hands hurt him.
"Somebody left a dead man on our ground," I said when his eyes steadied. "Laid out across the patrol track for us to find. Did you know that?"
His face pulled, and not from anything my hands were doing. My hands were still.
"Dane," he said. "They called him Dane."
"You knew him."
"I fed him. I fed all of them. That was my job, the pens and the water.
" His throat worked. "Dane won his tenth fight two weeks back.
Ten's the number. You win ten and you're promoted out.
You don't fight anymore." His mouth kept working for a moment with nothing coming out of it.
"He was going to buy his mother a house, Doc.
He believed it. We all believed it. It's easier. "
I kept my fingers on his wrist and my voice level. "Promoted to what?"
"The long hunt," he said with his eyes on the ceiling.
"The pit's the tryout, Doc. That whole show, the fights, the betting, all of it.
He's at the rail every night, watching how they move.
He's picking. The ones worth running get promoted, and promoted means they drive you out, and they give you a day's start, and then they hunt you.
Rifles. Dogs some nights. He rides the ridgeline and takes the shot himself when there's a shot worth taking. "
"Where," I asked.
"Past the river." His eyes lost their hold on the ceiling and wandered. "There's a cattle gate with a chain on it, and you follow the wash until..." He shook his head.
I stayed where I was, one palm on the dressing, two fingers on the pulse, and everything behind them turned cold and orderly, the way it had in the helicopters when the ground fire started.
"Dane ran two days," Miguel said. "They brought him back across the yard so we'd all see. They made us look at his feet, Doc. They made the pens walk past and look at his feet. And then they cleaned him up nicely and drove him somewhere, and that night I ran."
"That how you got shot?"
"Ortiz shot me." He almost laughed, and the laugh pulled at the packing and turned into a hiss. "Ortiz couldn't hit the pen wall from inside the pen. Day and a half I walked. I knew the doctor was here. Everybody knows where the doctor went."
Sarah sucked in a sharp breath through her teeth. I didn't look at her. I looked at the boy who had pushed water through a fence at me for five months, and never once raised a hand to me.
"Miguel. Five months I fought his boars, and I never won ten of anything. Why did he keep feeding me?"
"Saving you." His eyes closed. "For his birthday bash."
"I was beaten twice in that place," I said. "For refusing the fights."
"Ortiz had money down on you fighting." His head rolled toward me on the pillow. "Zaroff broke his hand for the second beating. Not for your sake, Doc. For the same reason nobody kicks the pens. You don't damage stock you mean to run."
Sierra took the basin out from under my hands and set a clean one down. I taped the dressing, checked the packing, and pulled the blanket to Miguel's chest.
"Sleep," I told him. "I expect the fever to climb tonight and break tomorrow. If I'm wrong, somebody will be in this chair to know it early."
He was asleep before I had finished saying it.
On my way out, I looked for Coyote and found him on the roof of the equipment shed, cross-legged in the sun, facing the river, the whetstone still in his hand. I lifted a hand to him. He didn't lift one back, but his eyes stayed on me until the kitchen door closed behind me.
I spent the afternoon between the cot and the kitchen. I let the water run over my wrists until my hands were steady enough to dry. Then I boiled the instruments and laid out clean dressings for the night.
The fever climbed at dusk, the way I'd expected. I took the first watch with the lamp turned low and two fingers on Miguel's wrist, counting. Five years ago I had counted like this with my hand flat on my husband's chest, in a room with better equipment and worse odds.
Coyote carried a plate in to me at the start of the watch, beans and two folded tortillas, and set it on the chair arm without asking whether I would eat. Then he stood over the cot and studied Miguel with his head tipped, the same way he studied ground.
"Did he ever hurt you?" he asked.
I shook my head. "He was good to me. Brought me chocolate once. He was softer than the rest. I always worried about him."
He watched the boy for a while longer. "Then nobody touches him." He folded himself down against the wall by the door with his knife loose in his lap.
The plate sat on the chair arm and cooled. Twice, Coyote tipped his knife at it from the wall, and twice I picked up a tortilla and put it back down. My stomach was too upset to eat. Sierra brought coffee after sunset, and the coffee stayed down.
Coyote rose, and on his way out, he kissed the top of my head. I leaned into it for the space of a breath, and then he took a cup from Sierra in passing and slipped out to walk the east line.
"If the wound keeps draining, the fever should break tomorrow night," I told Sierra. "If it climbs past what I can manage here, he should go to a hospital."
"Hospital will have questions about a gunshot wound," Sierra said.
"Let them ask. Doesn't mean we have to answer."
I checked the packing at ten and again at eleven, and changed the outer dressing when it soaked through. The thermometer read a hundred and three both times, and his pulse ran fast but no faster than it had at dusk.
Past midnight, the fever crested. Miguel surfaced out of it all at once, eyes wide and too bright, and his hand caught my wrist with more strength than his blood pressure had any right to lend him.
"Doc." He pulled me down toward his face. "You have to hear me. Everybody thinks he wants the ranch. He doesn't want the ranch."
"Easy. I'm listening."
"He doesn't even want you back." His grip shook on my wrist. "You're spoiled stock now, that's what he said, spoiled.
It's the little one. The one who walked into his pit and cut his fighter out of it and made him nothing in front of everybody.
He talks about him at the rail. He's had fighters, Doc, he's had runners, he's never had a tracker to run.
Now he wants him for his birthday bash."
The lamp hissed. Miguel's pulse beat fast and thin under my fingers, and I held his wrist and did not let my hand close the way it wanted to close.
Coyote stood in the doorway with the night behind him. He had heard every word of it. His face showed nothing at all, but at his throat, Nimue drew herself tight.