19. Eighteen
"Doc? You got a band-aid?"
Cruz leaned in my doorway, holding his thumb out in front of him like it belonged to somebody else.
"It's stupid, I know. It's a splinter. Mateo said don't bother you, but it's in there deep and I can't get it with my teeth.
And Sierra won't let me touch his tweezers on account of the last time, which was one time—"
I had been counting suture packs into the lid of Sierra's kit for the second time that hour.
Enough for a few limbs and a scalp, if nobody bled out while I worked.
The sun was off the ridge. The lantern was burning.
For an hour I'd been telling myself that forty minutes up and forty minutes back was a soft number on a dark trail.
Cruz was supposed to be on that trail with him.
The shears slipped out of my fingers and hit the dirt floor. "Where is he?"
"Who?"
"Coyote."
"How would I know?" Cruz turned his thumb toward the light. "Haven't seen him since breakfast."
Cold ran up the back of my neck and down both arms. I shoved off the step, and pain tore through the right side low where the stitches ran, deep enough to lock the breath in my chest. I braced one hand flat on the shelf.
The kit lay open on the step where I'd left it. I latched it and hauled it up.
"Doc?" Cruz backed out of the doorway with his thumb forgotten at his side. "Doc, you're scaring me."
"Where's Sierra?"
"Kitchen—"
He was still holding his thumb out when I blew past him.
Cruz overtook me before I had even made the middle of the yard, his boots hammering the packed dirt, hollering for Sierra. I resented his knees. Thirty years and a set of cracked ribs between us, and I felt every one of them.
By the time I reached the bottom step, Sierra had already shouldered the door open, a dish towel still draped over his shoulder.
"He's not on the ranch," I said.
"Who?" Sierra asked.
"Coyote. He's gone."
Sierra pulled the towel off his shoulder and dropped it over the rail. "The arroyo," he said.
"He took the snake up to the cave. He told me he'd take Cruz."
"You know the way?"
I nodded and turned toward the barn.
I beat him to the barn and got two steps inside the double doors before I stopped.
The tack hung on the wall where it had hung since Coyote first walked me down there. Saddle. Blanket. Bridle. I could name every strap. He'd tightened a cinch in front of me and Linc had checked one behind him, and I'd have bet my license I remembered the order of it.
Yet I stood there with my hands open and my ribs pulling, and I could not make my body do one useful thing with any of it.
Sierra came in behind me, pulled a heavy wool blanket off the wall, and threw it over the gelding's back in one smooth motion.
"Move," he said, and stepped clear of the gelding's hip.
I moved out of his way.
He saddled the horse faster than I could have described it. Blanket, saddle, cinch. He ran the whole job and looked at none of it, staring off somewhere past the barn wall. Then he ducked under the gelding's neck and hauled a second saddle off the rack.
"Sierra."
"Don't."
"I can go alone."
"You can't even tighten a cinch." He swung the saddle onto his own mare without any apparent effort. "You'd be walking home in the dark. Get on the rail."
I climbed the corral rail, put my boot in the stirrup, and hauled myself up. It tore up my side. The bite over my heart pulled hard under the tape. I sat there and breathed through it while Sierra checked my cinch and then checked it again.
He handed me the reins. "Don't steer him," Sierra said. "He's walked that trail a hundred times. Keep your hands down and stay on him."
Then he pulled his rifle out of the scabbard beside the barn door, laid it across his thighs, and rode his mare out the gate at a trot.
Pain ran up my right side with every stride, and my hands sat wrong on the reins the whole way through the gate.
The gelding settled in behind Sierra's mare. Once I understood he intended to do the whole ride without my help, I laid the reins slack across his neck. I dug his map out of my shirt pocket, opened it against the horn, and found the cave, penciled in where the arroyo forked.
The trail climbed out of the arroyo. Every switchback put more dark between us and the lit kitchen window. Sierra rode ahead and to my left and never checked on me once. The gelding worked his own way through the loose rocks.
The trail ended at the rocks. Coyote's mare stood tied under the overhang, her head down and her hip cocked. For one stupid second, I let go of all of it. His horse was right there. His horse standing there meant he was there, too.
Her cinch hung loose. Nobody had gone back and tightened it.
He would never leave a horse standing loose-cinched after dark. Not with Zaroff's men working this side of the river. My hands turned cold on the reins.
Sierra tied both our horses beside her and took the last climb ahead of me. He caught my elbow at the top and hauled me up. I took the hand. Pride was for men with intact ribs.
The bones he'd wired across the cave mouth hung dead still.
I ducked under the low rock overhang and stepped into the cave.
The damp cold hit me before my eyes could adjust to the dark.
On the flat stone bench, in the wooden crate with the black tape sliced clean open, and the lid set aside, Nimue lay coiled in three tight loops.
Her head was tucked, her eyes milky blue.
The water pan sat full. A rag lay folded over the edge, soaked through.
He'd carried her up here, cut the tape, filled her pan, and folded her rag. He'd done what he’d come up there to do, at least.
I crouched beside the bench. She lifted her head and wove it, tasting the air, hunting a threat she couldn't see. I kept my hands flat on my knees.
She couldn't travel blind, and she couldn't hunt blind, and moving her would have been the same as saying he wasn't coming back for her. I left her and walked back out.
I wasn't a tracker. Coyote could squat in this dirt and name a man's weight, which heel he favored, and how many minutes back he'd stood there. I couldn't read an inch of this ground on a good day.
But I didn't have to.
Blood marked the rock. Not a smear. It had sprayed across one stone and run down the side. An arm's length off, it had pooled, dried at the edges, and pooled again. Somebody had bled hard and stayed on their feet while they did it.
His knife lay in the dirt six feet off the trail, its blade open and dark to the hilt. He'd never have let go of that on purpose.
Heavy scuff marks cut the dirt in a long, ragged furrow where a set of boot heels had dragged through the gravel. Rocks kicked out in a wide spray. There was one clear, deep crater where a knee had come down and stayed.
Sierra crouched, lifted the blade between two fingers, turned it once, and pushed it through his belt. Neither of us said out loud whose blood was on it.
My hands started to shake. "Zaroff has him."
Sierra straightened up slowly. He looked down toward the county road, where all the tracks pointed. "You don't know that."
"Zaroff has him."
He looked at the drag marks again and quit arguing.
I started limping back down the trail.
"Where are you going?" he asked.
I reached into my pocket and closed my fist around the cold metal of the flatbed key.
Past the river. A cattle gate with a chain on it. Follow the wash until I saw the lights of Zaroff’s camp.
I could finish it.
For five months I'd slept on that ground. I knew how the road ran in and which trailer covered it. The trailers, the pens, which way each of them faced. The wash bent behind the burn pile and ran shallow enough to cross on foot.
"Sierra."
He looked up.
"Give me the rifle."
His hands stopped on the bolt. He stood in the gathering dark, holding the weapon across his chest.
"If Zaroff puts himself in front of me," I said, "I'm going to kill him."