17. Sixteen
I took the line out of Miguel's arm exactly as I would have from a living man, thumb braced over the vein, tape peeled back so it wouldn't lift the skin.
I worked through it the same as any other line, any other arm.
Two wars and thirty years of medicine, and not one hour of it covered this, so I stood in the guest room at first light holding a cotton ball on a puncture that was never going to bruise.
I'd lost people. In helicopters, on tables, across years of clinic work, to bleeds and fevers and the hours it took to get a body onto a table. I knew how to cope with losing patients. Nobody had ever walked into a house and murdered a patient steps from where I lay dreaming.
Sierra brought in a basin of water he'd heated on the stove, towels over his arm.
Steam came off it. There was no reason to warm water for a dead boy.
My throat closed on it, and I kept my mouth shut, and so did he.
We washed him together, Sierra at his head, me at the wounds, undoing my own work a piece at a time.
The thigh dressing I'd changed at midnight was still flat and clean.
It wasn't fair. The kid had done the hard part.
He'd sweated the fever out and turned the corner in the dark with Sierra sitting right there, and he'd been going to live.
Somebody stood over him with something soft and enough patience and undid all of it.
"He goes up past the kitchen garden," Sierra said.
He folded the boy's hands one over the other on his chest and stood there with a towel wrung between his fists.
"Where I can see him from my window. Send Fenix up after, and let him do his part for the boy.
But not the shovel. I know it's his job. Not this one. This one's mine."
"Okay. Tell me when, and I'll help you dig it."
"Lo siento, hijo," he said to the boy. Then he stopped talking.
Sarah stood in the doorway through most of it with her cardigan wrapped close and her arms crossed.
She wasn't squeamish about the body. Eleven months of morgue calls had burned that out of her.
She kept her eyes on the work and said nothing, and was still standing there when Coyote came in from the arroyo.
He was dusty to the knees, fresh dirt ground into the heels of his hands from where he'd been down on them reading the ground. Nimue was wrapped around his collar with her head out, tasting the room.
"He came in on the arroyo path behind the second barn," he said. "Same way I'd have done it. He waited for the watch change and walked through the hole in it, and he went out the same way. The trail dies at the county road. One vehicle sat there a long while, and it was gone before light."
"The tracker's gone," I said. "Joe stripped every truck on this place to the frame."
"He didn't need a tracker." Coyote's jaw worked once.
"There's a hide up on the arroyo's lip. Grass pressed flat where a man was, and it's already standing back up, so he waited there one night and no more.
From there he could easily see the kitchen windows and this door.
" He tipped his chin at the window over the cot without looking at it.
"One night was enough. I walk that lip every week," he said. Nimue drew in tight against his neck.
"You were in this room with his fever half of yesterday," Sierra said. "Same as the rest of us."
"I didn't walk it."
Sarah spoke from the doorway. "I'll pack now."
I turned. "Sare."
"Don't." She came a step into the room and made herself look at Miguel while she said it.
"I've been here long enough to know the watch schedule by heart.
And a man still walked past every gun on this ranch and smothered a boy in his bed.
There are no safe rooms in this house, John.
" Her arms tightened across her chest. "If I stay, I'm one more throat he can cut whenever he wants something out of you. I won't be that."
She was right. I'd been lost to her a long time and found for a week, and I wanted her where I could see her, at Sierra's stove, on the porch with her coffee, anywhere within reach. Wanting it didn't make it safe. It was selfish, and she'd worked that out before I was willing to.
Rafe made the arrangements at the kitchen table without ever raising his voice.
There was one road in or out, and everybody at that table already knew it, so he built the run around that instead of pretending we had options.
Winston would come north and meet us at the turnoff with a deputy and a second vehicle, which cut the exposed stretch in half.
The county patrol ran the boundary road southbound at noon, and we'd roll out ten minutes behind it, in its dust, over asphalt somebody had just cleared for us.
Linc would drive. I'd ride in the cab with Sarah.
Coyote would take the bed, not because there was no room in the cab, but because a man in the bed with a rifle was worth more back there than anything else we had.
Winston expected us at his office by four.
He'd hand Sarah back her phone, follow her every mile to Socorro, and put a deputy on her street until this was over.
"He's been asking his questions all week," Rafe said, meaning Winston, meaning the calls out to the county. "Zaroff can feel that. Men who feel that get impatient."
I knew what impatient meant, and my gut knew it before the rest of me caught up. I climbed into the truck anyway.
We rolled out past midday. The county road ran flat along the east boundary before it bent south toward town, heat standing up off the blacktop in sheets.
None of it mattered, and I knew that before we cleared the cattle guard.
Zaroff didn't need to know when we were coming or who'd be in the truck.
He'd already shown us how patient he was.
All he had to do was pick his spot on the one road we had and wait for us to need groceries, or a doctor, or to put somebody's sister on a highway.
Sarah rode between Linc and me with her one bag at her feet and her hands folded in her lap.
The cab smelled like gun oil and the lemon lotion she'd used since before our mother died.
Coyote sat in the bed with his back against the cab.
I couldn't see him without turning around, and I didn't need to.
I could feel him back there, a point of heat behind my left shoulder.
I could find him anywhere on the ranch now if I stopped and paid attention.
A few miles out, a sedan sat across both lanes at the culvert, hood up, nobody standing by it.
Linc eased off the gas. "Crossing's flat enough on the right," he said. "I can take the shoulder around the—"
Coyote hammered the cab roof twice. "There's no dust on it! Don't slow, go, go—"
The windshield cracked.
I had a hand on the back of Sarah's neck before the glass finished breaking, and I put her down flat on the bench with my body over hers.
Rounds punched the front end in a fast, even string, and the wheel must have blown out because the truck swung hard left and dropped nose-down into the ditch with a slam that threw us all into the dash.
More fire from the right, working the cab, punching through the door over our heads.
"Linc's side," I said against Sarah's ear. "Stay low."
Linc kicked his door open and went out into the ditch, and I pushed Sarah out behind him and came out on top of her. A seam of heat tore up my right side, but the stitches held.
Linc came up over me with his rifle already up and fired twice across the hood, and by the sedan a man went down and stayed down.
Then a round kicked Linc's leg out from under him, and he dropped into the grass beside us with his teeth bared, and the blood came up through his jeans black in the sun.
My bag was in my hand. I had no memory of taking it off the floorboard.
I cut the denim open with the shears, and it was the left thigh, in and out, the exit two fingers off the femoral.
Two fingers the other way and I'd have been kneeling on his groin in the grass watching him go gray.
Dark blood, welling steadily. Not bright.
Not jumping. The artery was intact, and I said so out loud, mostly to Linc.
"Sarah. Hands here, stacked, all your weight on them. Don't let up because he complains."
"I won't." She put her hands where mine had been without a flinch, and I loved her so much in that second it was hard to see straight.
The bed of the truck was already empty. I never saw Coyote leave it.
The rifles on the rise fired again, and then one of them stopped. A man up there started screaming, high and continuous, and then the second rifle stopped, and then the screaming stopped too, all inside the time it took me to tear open a packing roll with my teeth.
"Did I get one?" Linc's face was gray. His hands were folded across his chest.
"You got one."
"Good." He let his head fall back into the grass and looked at the sky. "Rafe's going to be pissed about the truck."
"You're about to spend a month in Sierra's front room getting fed every hour on the hour," I said, packing the exit wound while Sarah bore down. "The truck's the least of your problems."
The last man broke from behind the sedan and ran for the culvert. He had an open road ahead of him. He was young, and he was fast, and none of that was going to save him, because I knew what was coming off that rise behind him.
Coyote pounced on him and they hit the blacktop together. Coyote’s knife went in three times, and the man's heels quit working against the road. The fourth went in after he'd already stopped, and I felt that one somewhere under my sternum.
My thumb stayed on the packing in Linc's thigh. The pressure under my hand never changed. I didn't call out to him, and by the time he stood up and spat on the body, my back teeth ached from the set of my jaw.