17. Sixteen #2
Sarah had her weight stacked on Linc's thigh and her chin up over the lip of the ditch the whole time.
She didn't look away. Some useless part of me wished she would, and a truer part of me was glad she saw exactly what stood between this family and that man.
Both parts were mine, and I'd quit trying to talk myself out of either one.
Coyote slid into the ditch, bloody to the elbow, more of it dried on his cheek. Nimue lay flat and tight against his throat. He put his arms around me, buried his face in my neck, and inhaled.
Then I caught his wrist and turned his forearm over. A graze ran along the top of it, shallow and ugly, full of grit.
"You're hit."
"Grazed."
"You're next after Linc."
"After Linc," he said, and went back up on the road to make sure the bodies were dead.
He came back with his head cocked at the wreck, and he walked the length of it once before he said anything, dragging two fingers along the holes in the driver's door.
"Engine. Tire. Glass. Door," he said. "Nothing in the bed.
Nothing on the tailgate. Look at it, big man.
They stopped the truck, then they went at the one with the rifle, and they left me alone.
" He crouched and put his thumb in a hole in the fender.
"That's not four men who came out here to kill.
That's four men who came out here to load something. "
"Load what?"
"Me." He wiped his thumb clean on his jeans. "Taking me was the job. Everything else was just clearing the road."
I finished the knot on Linc's thigh without looking up.
When the dressing was tied off and holding, Sarah climbed into the wrecked cab and worked the radio herself, and her voice only started shaking after she'd let go of the handset.
Winston made it out to us fast, with two trucks, a deputy, and no siren.
Joe came in behind him in the ranch's other truck.
Sarah's call had gone out to everybody with a radio, and Rafe had put somebody on the road within a minute of hearing it.
Winston stood in the road with his thumbs in his belt, looked at the sedan, the rise, the four dead men, and then at me.
"Attempted robbery on a county road," he said.
"Occupants defended themselves. That'll hold up, and most of it's even true, which helps.
" He rubbed the back of his neck and looked down the blacktop toward town.
"Get your wounded out of here before somebody from the state shows up and starts asking me things I'd rather not answer. "
Linc I wanted on Sierra's table inside the hour.
The pulse at his ankle was strong, his foot was warm, and he'd keep the leg and everything under it.
He wasn't going to be walking on it for a month at the earliest, and when I told him that, he took it worse than he'd taken the bullet.
We lifted him onto blankets in the deputy's truck, and he held my sleeve a second.
"Doc. She okay?"
"She's okay. You put your head down."
Joe stood at his own tailgate the whole time with his jaw locked.
Sarah came around the tailgate, wiping her hands on a square of gauze too small for the job.
Up close she smelled like lemon and cordite, and there was Linc's blood dried on her fingers.
She looked past my shoulder at Coyote, who was crouched on the blacktop cleaning his knife on a dead man's jacket.
"Eleven months," she said. "The whole time, I kept thinking, when I find him, I'll bring him home.
I kept your room. I kept buying that terrible coffee you like, so it'd be there.
" She hit my arm twice, hard. "You're already home.
I watched it happen today. In a ditch, John.
You knew exactly what this was, and you picked it anyway.
" She pressed the gauze flat in her fist. "I'm not going to pretend I understand.
But I saw it. That'll have to be enough for both of us. "
"Sare."
"Don't." Her chin was trembling. She grabbed two fists of my shirt anyway and pulled me down and held on hard. "You call me Sundays," she said into my collar. "Winston's giving my phone back today, so you've got no excuse. Sundays, John."
"Sundays," I agreed.
She let go, stepped back, and put her cardigan straight. Then she looked at Coyote again and raised her voice enough to reach him.
"Holidays," she said. "Both of you. Bring the snake."
Coyote thought it over. "She sleeps when it's cold."
"Then she'll be the easiest guest I've ever had." Sarah climbed into Winston's cruiser and pulled the door shut, and she didn't look back through the glass. I knew why. If she'd looked back, she'd have gotten out again, and we'd have had to start the whole goodbye over with less daylight.
I stood in the road until the blacktop was empty south of me.
Then I turned around and walked back. Coyote crouched over the man on the blacktop with both hands in the dead man's jacket, and he didn't look up until I closed my fist in his collar and hauled him onto his feet.
"You don't jump out of a moving truck," I said. "You don't do that again."
"He was going to—"
"I know what he was going to do."
Nimue slid across my knuckles. He hung there in my fist with his hands at his sides. He didn't twist my wrist, and he didn't drop me on my back, and either one would have taken him a second and a half.
"Okay," he said.
I opened my fist. My hands were steady.
"I'm going to kill him," he said.
"Good," I said. I put my hand flat against the back of his neck and held it there a second, and then I walked back toward Joe's truck.