60. Chapter 60
“Don’t move. You’re going to be all right. You hear me? I’ll get help.”
There was blood on the road. On his hands. On the sleeves of his jacket. Soaked into the sand in the ditch around the body of a small woman laying broken and mangled.
He scrambled up the embankment to his bike, and up the road to the lights a half mile away.
He spilled off the Electra Glide in front of a shop door, screaming for help. A tall rail of a man with thick, black hair paled at Jason covered in blood.
“Accident,” was all he said.
That’s right. There’d been an accident. He’d been riding into the desert for days.
When it came time to head north to Not Your Oasis, Jason continued west toward Southern California on a route he didn’t often take.
He thought the streaks of blood were black tar on the dark road and would’ve kept riding if he hadn’t spotted the woman’s leg sticking out of the ditch.
The tall rail grabbed Jason by the jacket and shoved him into his powder-blue pickup, and they raced down the road to the woman barely clinging to life.
The man screamed her name over and over. Linda. Linda. She wasn’t breathing.
Jason dropped to the ground. As a kid, he’d seen a woman in the trailer park giving mouth-to-mouth to her husband after a heart attack, so he tipped Linda’s head back and put his mouth to her sandy, bloody lips, and blew.
The thin man screamed and cried, bargaining with God and the devil until the woman finally sucked in a breath and opened her eyes.
“Linda,” the man sobbed and kissed her. “Hang on baby, hang on.”