20. Nineteen
Four times in my life somebody had knocked me out, and all four times I came back fast and mean and already swinging.
Not this time.
I surfaced one inch at a time. Every time I neared the top, it dropped me back down. My tongue felt swollen and tasted like dry paste. I told my left hand to close, and it closed half a second later.
Then my stomach turned over. I threw up, and I couldn't move my head fast enough to miss my own shoulder.
That was how I knew.
A beating didn't do that. I'd been beaten by professionals and I'd been beaten by drunks, and a beating hurt in the places it landed and left the rest sharp. This was all of me at once, and almost none of it was pain. Parts of me switched back on in an order I hadn't picked.
Somebody had drugged me.
When I could hold a thought without it sliding sideways, I started at the top of my body and worked down.
There was a fat, hot knot above my right ear where a club had connected. My right eye was swollen shut. I opened the left one and waited for the world to come back into focus.
My teeth were all present. I ran my tongue over the ridges twice to be sure. I tasted copper and boot leather, and I remembered exactly whose ankle I'd chewed through and felt decent about it. It wasn't nothing.
My knees were already scabbed over. Scabs took hours. I'd been out for a while.
I lifted my right hand off the dirt and looked at it and wished I hadn't.
It didn't look like mine. It was swollen and purple across the back, the fingers fat and wrong, radiating enough heat that I could feel it two inches off with my good palm.
The knuckles sat in a crooked ridge. I tried to flex the fingers and found a tiny bit of give before a white spike of pain went straight up my forearm, putting a fresh coat of sweat on my forehead.
Broken in three places, maybe four. It was my knife hand, the hand I did everything with.
The last thing I remembered was the ridge: my cheek flat on the cold rock, gravel in my teeth, arms hauled back, and Zaroff putting two fingers under my chin to tilt my face up so he could see it. The sun was off the high peaks by then, but there was still a purple light in the sky.
After that, I had nothing.
I was the best tracker in this corner of the state, and I couldn't have said at gunpoint how I'd gotten here, or how to get home.
The hand would knit. Bone did that on its own. But the other thing, the missing miles, the blank space where my memories should have been, was gone. I'd have traded the hand to have those hours back.
I rolled onto my left hip and pushed up onto one elbow, waiting for the walls to stop spinning.
That was when I felt it: a spot on the side of my neck, low and hot above the collarbone.
Pain flashed when I turned my head. I reached up with my good hand.
My fingers found a hard, tender knot under the skin about the size of a pinto bean, with a tiny scab right in the center no bigger than a tick bite.
I knew what that knot was. It was the mark a thick needle left when somebody shoved it into a neck muscle in a hurry and didn't care how deep it went.
I let my head fall back onto the dirt and stared up at the corrugated tin. The tin ticked and popped over my head, and the heat came back down off it. I laughed because what else was there to do?
I was stock now. Not a prisoner, not a hostage, not an enemy. I'd have known what to do with any of those. I was just cattle, moved from one corral to another by a man who kept the books, owned the trailers, and slept fine.
I sat up.
Then I looked at where they'd put me, and the anger cooled.
There was chain-link on three sides, a heavy pipe frame, tin roof, dirt floor.
There was a gate with a rusted hasp and a padlock on the outside, well out of reach.
A steel ring was welded directly into the sheet-metal back wall, about a foot off the ground, with a thick log-chain running out of it. The ankle cuff lay open in the dirt.
I knew this place. I'd crouched right here once, on the balls of my feet with my wrists draped over my knees, asking a chained-up giant if he spoke English, and I'd slipped through that very gate. This was John's pen.
I stood all the way up. My hair didn't graze the tin. I had six inches over my head, easy, standing right in the center of the floor with room to spare.
John couldn't have stood upright in here, not once. He ducked through every door at Pae Saco and filled the doorway of the shed. Five months without straightening his spine, and he'd never mentioned it.
I turned, my boots scraping the dirt, and looked at the walls.
There, on the galvanized sheet metal of the back wall, up high. I had to tilt my head back to see them. Tally marks, four vertical strokes and a diagonal slash, over and over.
I counted the rows. Ten rows of fifty. Then a final row with eleven marks, ending in empty metal. Five hundred and eleven. It wasn't days. Five months didn't come anywhere near it.
John Jameson was a counter. He counted suture packs he'd already sorted three times. He counted my pulse when he thought I was asleep. Something had happened in this tin box that made him drop his nail and stop counting.
But below the tallies, carved smaller and with more care, was a column of names. Eight in block capitals, cut deeper than the marks above them, deep enough that my thumb dropped into the letters.
The ninth stopped partway. Two letters and the start of a third, the last stroke running off into bare galvanized steel and never turning back.
So that was the afternoon. He'd been writing a man down when the nail left his hand, and he never picked it up again, and the ninth man stayed two letters long.
Nine men out of these pens, gone out that gate and never back through it.
Nobody was ever going to write them down.
So the doctor did it himself. He was the only ledger they had left, and then we'd hauled him out of this yard and set him up in an equipment shed with a bucket and some gauze, and he'd never said a goddamn word about it.
The crunch of boots on the gravel came before the voice. I turned around without hurrying, letting my weight settle back onto my heels, because I wasn't going to let him see me startle.
Zaroff stood outside the wire with two of his hired hands at his shoulders. His fingers were up at his collar, working those white boar tusks he wore on his chest between them.
"Finally awake, are you?"
"Unfortunately for you."
"Why’s that?"
"Because I'm going to kill you."
He laughed, dry and easy, and I hated him for it. "Look at you. Not even ten minutes awake and already barking."
"I've spent nine years letting a snake sleep on my collarbone," I said. "You think a dog kennel makes me nervous?"
"I think you're entertaining." He dropped down into a squat on the other side of the fence, his wrists resting easily on his knees.
"Let me see the hand," he said.
"Come inside."
"Show it to me, Coyote."
I lifted my right arm and took my time about it.
His mouth tightened, his brow came down, and he hissed through his teeth.
"Who did that?" he asked, not looking back.
The man on his left shifted his feet in the gravel. "Bern, boss. Up on the ridge."
Zaroff stood up, brushing the yellow dust off his pants with two neat strokes. His hand came back up to the tusks. He wasn't angry. He was disappointed.
"Bern." Zaroff stopped working the tusks.
"He was on the dirt, boss," the guard said, watching his own feet. "The kid was biting his boots. Screaming like a wildcat. Bern had to lay him out."
Zaroff's eyes stayed on my swollen knuckles. "Tape it. Find a splint, bind it tight, and do it now. And tell Bern to stay in the bunkhouse. If I see his face before sunrise, I'll take the difference out of his skin."
"You plan to hunt me," I said.
He looked back at me through the wire.
"You heard me," I said. I forced my mouth into a grin, feeling the scab on my lip split and the warm copper run down my chin. "I know the drill.”
The guards shifted, uneasy.
Zaroff grinned. “I've got forty people driving in from town tonight who have paid good money to come help me celebrate my birthday. You’re the main event. You should be honored.”
I looked over his shoulder.
Out beyond his head lay the gravel lot, the rusted stock trailers, the concrete drainage basin with the truck hoods bolted around the lip, and the dirt road winding south.
Past all of it was the empty space. Just greasewood and limestone, the ridge dry and pale in the late light, and past that the mountains, blue and flat.
The same ones I looked at every summer on the Pae Saco porch.
Zaroff followed my eye down to the road and let his hand fall off the tusks.
"Nobody's coming to save you." He tipped his chin toward it. "Nobody in this county is stupid enough to bring a fight to my doorstep. Not to save one scrawny tracker."
I glared at him. “Then you’d better be right. If you’re wrong, I’ll be in your dark with you, and I’ll be the one who can see.”
He laughed again, loud and sharp. "Look around you. Even if those idiots down at the ranch did come for you, they’re outgunned.
They’d be riding to their death. You think they’re going to ride out here and die for some feral thing that's half man, half beast? They didn’t come when I dropped a body at their doorstep.
Hell, they couldn’t stop me when I walked through their fucking front door to smother one of my own.
What makes you think you’re so goddamn special that they come all the way out here to die for you? "
I swallowed and said nothing. What was there to say?
He was right. If Linc and Sierra and Ransom rode up through that narrow pass to break me out, they’d be dead before morning.
I didn’t want them to come save me. Not if it cost them their lives.
But that didn’t mean I was going to lie down and die like Zaroff wanted.
Zaroff tapped the tusks twice against his collar. "I’ll tell you what. Since I’m such a good sport, I’ll make you a deal. The long run gets you a day’s start. This isn’t the long run. This is one night, my ground, my guests. You last until dawn, you’re free to go. Nobody ever has."
Zaroff smiled at me one last time and stood.
"See you later," he said, and turned his back on the cage.
The two guards unlocked the gate and came in to fix the hand.
They didn't ask for my permission, and I didn't offer any help. One of them drove a heavy knee into the center of my back, pinning me to the dirt, while the other grabbed my swollen right wrist, laid a flat wooden paint stirrer along the palm, and began to wrap.
He wrapped it with silver duct tape, pulling it tight enough that the glue bit into my skin, binding the split wood against the broken bones from my knuckles all the way to the middle of my forearm.
He did it with the same careless grease-monkey focus he'd use to fix a cracked bumper.
My hand made a wet, grinding sound inside the tape.
I sat there with my arm cradled against my ribs, breathing through the nausea, and thought about the most useless thing possible: John's hands.
I thought about how he'd have looked at the skin before he ever laid a finger on it.
How he'd have talked me through the pain, telling me exactly what he was going to do before he did it, and how, once he'd set the splint, he'd have laid his big, dry palm flat against my chest and left it there until the shaking stopped.
It was a stupid thing to think about in a cage. But I couldn't stop it.
The light through the wire had dropped and turned red. Not much of it left.
I put my face close to the packed part and pulled air in through my nose.
Tin. Old piss. Dry rot in the dirt.
Nothing of him. A hundred and fifty days, and the ground had taken all of it back already.
I sat up. My eye stung, and I told myself it was dust.
There was an arc worn into the hardpack, smooth and dark, sweeping out from the anchor ring on the back wall and curving toward the gate. I walked it out.
Inside that circle, right against the sheet metal, the dirt was pressed flat in a shape about the size of a man.
Except it wasn't his size. It was two feet too short.
If he'd laid straight, his shins would have been out in the rough gravel.
He'd slept curled up for five months because the stall was built for things that didn't have to carry a head that high.
At the far edge of the circle, where the chain ran out against the wire, his boots had dug the dirt into a shallow bowl.
He'd stood there day after day. That was where the iron ran tight, and he'd kept his boots planted anyway, looking out at the yard, at the trucks, at the road, at nothing at all. He'd stood there enough to shift the dirt.
Down low on the wire at that spot, a foot off the ground, the galvanized links shone silver-bright. That was where Miguel had slid the water jug through in the dark.
I looked back at the walls for the thing I knew had to be there.
There wasn't a mark on them. No dents in the tin, no boot prints, no place where the wire had pulled off the pipe frame. He hadn't bent anything, torn anything, or kicked anything.
I'd have torn that wire with my teeth. I'd have broken my own skull against the pipe before I sat there.
I put my forehead against the tin and held it there until the heat hurt, because I needed something to want besides Zaroff's throat, and there wasn't anything.
Then I slid back down into John's arc of packed dirt, resting my spine against the sheet metal exactly where those scratches ended.
Zaroff had put me on this ground for free, and I was going to make him pay for it.