Chapter 27
I was elbow deep in a fox den, hunting for a severed hand, when I saw the lights.
The truck was on the federal lease road south of me, sweeping a floodlight across the desert like it was looking for a runaway calf. Except the thing it was tracking wasn't a calf. The thing it was tracking was a person.
I climbed up on a fence post to get a better look.
He was small. Barefoot. Hair so blond it caught the floodlight and threw it back, which was the kind of thing that gets you killed when somebody's hunting you.
To call what he was doing running would be generous.
It was more of an exhausted, full-body stagger.
Every so often one of the assholes in the truck bed would stand up, cock a rifle, and shoot at his feet, missing on purpose.
Then he'd sit back down and they'd all howl about it like it was the best joke they'd heard in years.
I watched for maybe a minute.
The hand could wait. The hand had been in that den for three days. Another hour wasn't going to change anything for the hand.
(Not my hand, by the way. Some asshole's hand. Long story.)
I climbed down and cut perpendicular across the hardpan, low and quick, using the creosote for cover. The floodlight was bright, but it was narrow, and they were locked on their prey. Tunnel vision. Made my job easier.
The runner went down hard about fifty yards out. I heard it more than I saw it — body hitting caliche, all the air punched out of him at once. He tried to get up. Couldn't. One of the men in the truck whooped like he'd just roped a steer.
Pendejos.
I dropped to my belly and crawled. The runner was clawing at the dirt now, fingers digging in like maybe he could pull himself underground if he just tried hard enough. He wasn't crying. Wasn't begging. Wasn't calling for his mom. Just panting these tight little animal sounds through his teeth.
The truck stopped. Doors opened. Three men got out, rifles slung lazily across their shoulders the way men carry guns when they think the dangerous part's over. One of them was running his mouth. Something about teaching the runner not to run. Something about making it last this time.
This time. Cute.
I slid the knife out of the sheath on my belt. It was ten inches of carbon steel and sharp enough to shave with. Not that I shave. I'd opened up a poacher's throat with this knife when I was ten years old and dragged him up a pine tree after, just to watch him swing. It would do for tonight.
The one doing the talking turned his back.
That was rude.
I went.
The first one didn't know I was there until the blade went into his kidney. He dropped without making more than a surprised little huh sound. Easy.
The second one heard that and turned. I was already moving low and fast, the way you chase rabbits through brush.
He tried to swing the rifle around, but I was inside his reach, shoulder into his gut, and we hit the ground tangled up.
Rifle went somewhere. Didn't care. He got his hands up and I bit down on his forearm, and listen, I know how that sounds, but it works.
Skin gives first. Then the meat under it.
His blood ran into my mouth, hot and copper, and he was screaming by the time my teeth hit bone.
I didn't let go until I got the knife up under his chin and shoved it through the soft palate into his brain.
Down he went.
The third one was backing toward the truck. He had his rifle up. He was actually trying to aim, which made him the smart one, but smart wasn't enough.
I went after him on all fours.
I know. Weird. I'd explain, but I don't really have a good explanation.
It's faster, it's harder to hit, and it freaks people out, which is honestly half the appeal.
He fired once, wildly, and the bullet kicked up dirt three feet to my left.
He was working the bolt for a second shot when I tackled him.
He put his hands up.
I cut through them.
He kept screaming, which, fair. I climbed him, dug my knees into his ribs, and brought the knife down a few more times until he stopped doing anything at all and everything was very red and very quiet.
I sat back on my heels and breathed.
The runner was twenty feet away, watching me.
He was still on his side in the dirt where they'd left him, knees pulled up, eyes huge. Right. The runner. I'd almost forgotten about the runner.
I flashed him a grin. "De nada."
He flinched.
It was a tiny flinch. Most men wouldn't have caught it. But I've spent a lot of time watching prey, and I caught it, and I felt bad about it, which was new.
I wiped the knife on the dead guy's shirt and put it away.
Boots crunched behind me and the runner's whole body went tight. I didn't bother turning around. The boots had a familiar rhythm.
Linc came over the rise with his rifle low and ready. He stopped about ten feet out and took the scene in slowly, working a piece of jerky in his back teeth the way he does when he's deciding whether to chew me out or just give up.
His eyes went to the runner.
I was on him before I knew I was moving. Up off my heels, between him and Owen, teeth out, snapping at the air an inch from his face. Close enough that I tasted the jerky on his breath.
Linc didn't move. He's known me a long time.
"Coyote."
I snapped at him again.
"Coyote."
I held there, breathing through my teeth, and somewhere underneath the red I started to come back. Linc. This was Linc.
I eased down off the balls of my feet.
Linc waited until I'd backed up a full step before he so much as blinked.
"Mine," I said. My voice came out wrong. Wet. "I found him."
"Yeah, Coyote. I got that."
I could feel Owen behind me. Locked up. Not breathing. He'd just watched me kill three men and then go for the fourth, and the fourth was a friend.
Shit.
Linc let out a long breath through his nose. He's been doing that since I was ten. It usually meant he was deciding whether to chew me out or just let it go. Tonight he let it go. He walked over to the closest body and nudged it with his boot to make sure it was done. It was.
"Three of them. By yourself."
"They weren't paying attention."
"Coyote."
"Linc."
He worked the jerky to the other side of his mouth and looked at the truck still idling on the lease road, headlights pointed off into nothing, floodlight tilted up at the sky like it was searching the moon.
"Rafe's gonna be pissed we didn't get the whole thing."
"Hand's still in the fox den at the north corner. About forty paces east of the windmill."
Linc stopped chewing.
"You're not gonna get it?"
"No."
"Coyote, you do not abandon a job."
"I'm not abandoning. I'm delegating."
"To who?"
"You."
He stared at me.
I didn't look away from Owen.
Linc sighed. "Fine. Fine. I'll get the hand. You go. Take him. And Coyote?"
"Mm."
"Try not to scare him to death."
"No promises."
I turned back to the runner.
Up close he was younger than he'd looked from the post. My age, maybe.
Maybe a year under. Hard to tell with the dirt and the dried blood and the way exhaustion was sitting on him like a wet coat.
He had the kind of face that probably cleaned up to something interesting, but right now it was mostly just hurt.
I went down on all fours and crawled the last few feet because my knees did not want to walk yet.
His eyes got bigger.
Right. People don't do that. I keep forgetting.
I leaned in and sniffed him.
Information, mostly. You get a lot that way.
Blood, sweat, fear, sun-cooked skin, a little bit of piss but only a little, which meant he'd been holding it together for a while before tonight.
No infection smell yet. No alcohol. He didn't smell like a story.
He just smelled like a guy who'd been running too long.
And then, underneath all that —
I leaned in again.
Yeah. There.
Salt. Warm skin. And underneath, something cool and dark and sweet — night-blooming, like the white flowers that only opened after sundown, the ones moths went stupid for. Polilla. Yeah. That.
Heat dropped through me from collarbone to hipbone in one slow pour. The back of my neck went hot. My mouth filled up with spit.
I wanted to put my face in his neck and breathe him in.
Then I wanted to push his arm up and put my face in his armpit, where the smell would be thicker and warmer and more his.
Then I wanted to push his thighs apart and put my face in his groin, where it would be the thickest, the most him, the part of him that was just for him and now also for me.
I wanted to come up smelling like him so anything that came near us would know.
I wanted him to smell like me for the same reason.
I wanted to crawl inside his ribcage like it was a den, and lie down in there and not come out for a while.
My cock throbbed.
Oh.
Oh.
So this was the thing. Huh. I'd watched it happen to Ransom and figured if it ever came for me it'd announce itself a little louder than this.
Apparently not. Apparently it just showed up under a creosote bush at three in the morning and pointed at a half-dead guy I'd known eleven minutes who looked like he'd been put through a wood chipper.
Cool. Cool, cool, cool.
He leaned away from me. "What the fuck are you doing?"
"Smelling you."
"Why?"
I thought about it.
"Don't know," I said. Honest. "Liked it."
He stared at me.
I leaned in and did it again. Slower this time. Right at the hinge of his jaw where the smell pooled.
He made a sound.
It was small. Barely a sound at all. A tiny broken thing in the back of his throat, and his whole body shuddered under it, one quick involuntary thing he couldn't stop in time.
His eyes went huge. Like he'd caught himself doing it.
My cock jerked. Got harder. There was no room left for it to get harder, and it did anyway.
I wanted to bite him.