Chapter 20
The walk to Coyote's was a quarter mile of God testing me to see what I had left, and I'll tell you right now, it wasn't much.
Ransom had me up under one arm and a fist in the back of my shirt, and he took most of my weight without making a thing about it. There's a way a man helps you when he wants you to notice and a way he helps you when he doesn't, and Ransom Lanza had been the second kind every day I'd known him.
My ribs ached. My arm bled into my sleeve, and my sleeve stuck to my arm. My nose was packed full of blood, and what wasn't packed in there ran down the back of my throat.
The ground rose up sideways, and Ransom hauled me back upright before I hit it.
"Eyes up, Ranger."
"I had 'em up."
"Have 'em higher."
"Yes sir," I said.
I'd built Coyote's place in my head out of bones and lean-tos and dead-thing wind chimes, because that's what his camp had looked like the time he'd buried me up to my neck in sand.
So when Ransom walked me around a finger of red rock and there was a cave there with smoke coming out of a crack above it, I was more surprised than I should have been.
"Of course you got a cave," I said.
"He's got several."
Coyote came out of the cave mouth before we got to it, barefoot and shirtless with Nimue draped across his shoulders the way another man might wear a scarf. He looked us over, clocked the blood on us, and frowned.
"You look much worse than she said you did," he said.
"Who?" Ransom asked, but Coyote didn't answer. He only waved us inside.
Ransom walked me through the entrance into a drop of ten degrees and most of the light.
There was a fire pit with coals banked low at one side, a pallet against the back wall with a folded wool blanket on it, shelves cut into the rock with jars and bundles and things I didn't have names for.
It looked exactly like the kind of place a man like Coyote ought to live, and that bothered me on a level I didn't have time to think about.
Ransom got me to the pallet and lowered me down slowly. He kept a hand behind my head until my head was on the blanket, then he took it back, and I immediately missed it.
"Eyes open," he said.
I opened them.
"Stay open."
"Workin' on it."
Coyote knelt beside me and started probing my ribs. He hit the third one on the left side, and I sucked air through my teeth.
"That one speaks," he said.
"That one hurts."
"And this one too?"
"That one too. Damn, Coyote."
"Sorry, Ranger." He didn't sound sorry. He sounded interested.
He moved to the arm, took my cuff in both hands and tore the shirt open up the seam to my shoulder. The cloth came away from the cut, and I sucked in a breath through my teeth. Coyote tipped his head sideways too far. "Shallow," he said.
"Told him that."
"He didn't believe you. He's like that."
"Startin' to figure that out."
Coyote glanced at Ransom and held the look, then turned back to me.
"I'm going to clean this. It's going to burn. Then I'm going to stitch it. That'll burn more. Then we'll do the nose. It'll hurt, but I'll be quick. The ribs will be slower and hurt less, but longer."
"Sounds like a hell of an evening."
"I'll make tea."
He laid out his tools on a square of leather: a needle, already threaded, a small dark bottle, a roll of cloth, and a brown jar with a wax seal.
"Ransom. The jar."
Ransom crouched at my head, thumbed the wax off, and set the jar where Coyote could reach it. Then he stayed there, on his heels, and put his hand flat against the side of my face, fingers spread wide. The weight of it settled me by maybe ten percent, and I'd take ten percent.
"There are four of them on the road," Ransom said.
"Which road?" Coyote asked.
"Road into Pae Saco."
Coyote's eyes flicked up briefly. "Our land or theirs?"
"Theirs, I think. Close to the border."
"Your man is leaking, Ransom. Let me do the plumbing first, and then I'll fetch."
Coyote got to work.
The burn came up through the meat of my arm, hot and bright, and I gritted my teeth around it and didn't move. Coyote sang, low and tuneless, in a Spanish I didn't entirely follow, and his hands moved quick and sure. I lay there with Ransom's palm flat on my skull and watched him.
"You smell like a train hit you, Ranger," Coyote said, conversational, not looking up from the needle.
"That a medical observation?"
"That's just what you smell like. Hold still."
Ransom's eyes were on Coyote's hands on my arm, his face still as sheet metal, his jaw a clean line. He had blood on his knuckles and along the edge of his hand and up his forearm where his sleeve was rolled, and most of it wasn't his.
Coyote pulled a stitch tight. The skin closed under the thread and the burn came up fresh.
Coyote stopped singing. "Brown jar by your knee, Ransom. Two fingers. Spread it on what I've closed. Don't be shy with it."
Ransom dipped his fingers in and came up with something dark, pine pitch and the inside of an old barn. He laid it across the closed stitches, careful as a man icing a cake, and the cool of it spread under the burn. I closed my eyes for a moment.
"Eyes, Ranger."
"Yeah." I opened my eyes. I hadn't realized I'd closed them.
His fingers kept moving down the cut behind Coyote's needle, and I thought about the dead men on the road.
What would happen if someone came up on them before Coyote got them moved?
It was wrong that I was worried they'd get caught, that Ransom might go away for murders he'd absolutely committed.
But he'd killed those men for me, and it also felt wrong not to be a little thankful for it.
Especially since I knew he'd kill more if I asked.
Nimue shifted on Coyote's shoulder and resettled.
I waited for the part of me that was supposed to argue back, the Ranger in me, the lawman, the man who'd worn a badge half his adult life.
He didn't show up. The Ranger had been packing his desk all morning while Cap looked at his face.
The Ranger had finished packing it on the road when Ransom had gone past me with a knife.
The badge in my back pocket was a piece of metal a captain in El Paso was a few days from repossessing.
There was no Ranger left in this cave to argue with anybody.
"Time to fix your snout," Coyote said.
I'd been dreading the nose.
He tied off the last stitch, wiped his hands on his thighs, and came up around to the head of the pallet. Ransom shifted to make room. Coyote took my jaw between his thumb and two fingers, light.
"Look at me, Ranger."
I looked.
His eyes were black and calm and a little too still. "Ransom. Hold his shoulders."
Ransom moved over me, knees on either side without putting weight on the ribs, a hand on each shoulder. His weight settled, and I looked up past him at the smoke marks on the cave ceiling and thought, Alright, fine, alright, here we go.
Coyote grabbed my nose with two fingers and yanked.
The sound was wet and bright. The pain bloomed through the whole front of my skull, and I bucked up off the pallet against Ransom's hands. Ransom held me down, and Coyote kept his fingers on my nose a moment longer to be sure, and let go.
"There," Coyote said, conversational. "That's better. Don't worry. You'll be pretty again someday, Ranger."
It wasn't better. But it was less wrong than it had been, like a fence post somebody had put back upright. I lay there breathing through my mouth and counting smoke marks. Ransom's hands came off my shoulders slowly, and he sat back on his heels.
Coyote packed both nostrils with something dark, juniper and pine, before moving to the ribs.
He pressed along each one and sang, "Doe, rae, mi…
Doe, rae, mi…" Then he brought a long strip of cloth, and Ransom helped him sit me up enough to get it under me, and the two of them wrapped my chest firm but not tight.
When the wrap was tight, Coyote retrieved the tea, which hadn't whistled yet, and poured me a cup. "Drink this. It'll taste bitter, but it helps with the pain."
I drank it. It tasted like the ground after a hard rain. He nodded, satisfied when I made a face, and took the cup back.
"You'll sleep in about ten minutes. Don't fight that either."
"Coyote, I need to check on the ranch," Ransom said.
Coyote shook his head. "You need to stay here. Shadows aren't allowed to wander. It's not my rule. It's theirs. So you stay with him. I'm going to ride out for your corpses. I'll pass over the ridge on my way and tell you what I see when I get back. Deal?"
"Deal," Ransom agreed.
He stood and went to the back of the cave. Ransom stayed where he was, on his heels by my hip, and I turned my head toward him carefully and found his face.
His face was still. The blood had dried on his knuckles and gone brown at the edges.
He looked like Ransom, the same Ransom who'd sat across a stove in a line shack, the same Ransom who'd eaten Sierra's eggs at the breakfast table at Pae Saco.
The killing had come up out of him as easily as pouring a cup of coffee, and then he'd gone right back to being the man who poured it.
"Hey," I said.
"Hey."
"C'mere."
He folded down by the pallet and put his hand back where it had been. I closed my eyes briefly, then opened them.
"You good?" I said.
"I'm here," he said.
"That ain't what I asked."
"I know."
I was too tired to push it. The tea was making me drowsy, and I had the sneaking suspicion there might've been an illegal substance or two in it. It didn't matter. I had what I needed. Ransom was here with me, and that's all I wanted.
I woke up with my mouth tasting like the ground after rain and a dull ache in my ribs. The cave was darker. The fire had burned down and somebody had banked it. Ransom sat against the cave wall by my head, hat off, knees up, one hand loose around the pistol on the ground next to him.
"How long was I out?" My voice was thick.
"Two and change."
"Coyote?"
"Not yet."
I turned my head. The cave was the same. The world had kept going while I'd been under it, and that was a little disappointing.
Hooves came up the wash fast, and I fought to sit up.
Ransom was on his feet before I'd gotten my elbows under me, hat on, hand at the back of his belt where the pistol sat.
"Ransom!" Coyote, from outside, half a shout. "Ransom, get out here."
Ransom looked at me once, then went.
I lay there listening through the cave mouth. I caught most of it. Coyote's voice came too fast and climbed at the ends of his words. The strange, smug calm he'd had on the way in was gone. There was smoke down at the ranch, wrong color and wrong kind. He'd seen it from the rise.
Ransom said something I didn't catch.
Coyote said: "Now, Ransom. Now."
Ransom came back through the entrance fast, hat low, jaw set.
"Can you ride?"
"I can ride. Get me up."
He got an arm under my shoulders lifting me off the pallet, and the cave swung once and steadied.
He walked me out into the dusk. Galahad stood saddled and breathing hard, reins looped over the horn.
Coyote stood at his shoulder with one hand flat against the horse's neck.
There were four bodies stacked on a wooden sled nearby, the kind of sled made for snowy hills in the winter.
Coyote was untying the sled from his horse, then he pulled a tarp over the bodies and quickly nailed it down.
"Two-up?" I said.
"Two-up. He'll carry it."
He swung up first and settled in the saddle, and reached down for me.
I got my boot in the stirrup and he caught me under the arm and pulled, and I came up across the saddle in front of him with my ribs screaming about every inch of it.
His arm came around me and locked across my chest, and held me against him.
"Lean back," he said. "Hand on the horn. Don't fight him."
I leaned. I put my hand on the horn. Galahad shifted under us, took the weight, and didn't object.
The arm across my chest didn't move. I wasn't going to ask it to.
"Coyote," Ransom said.
"Don't wait for me, Ransom. I'll come behind when I'm done here."
Ransom nodded, turned Galahad for the wash, and we went.
Galahad's head was up and his ears were forward, and Ransom didn't have to ask him for any of it.
Ransom's chest was warm against my back, and his arm was an iron bar across me.
The last light went purple over the ridge in front of us, and we rode hard for the ranch where a huge plume of black smoke rose into the air.