21. Twenty
Zaroff had bragged about forty people.
On my way out of the pen, I counted the folding chairs. He was short by a dozen.
They'd rigged the work lights up on two flatbed trailers and run a string of yellow bulbs directly over the concrete pit.
The folding chairs sat in neat, quiet rows facing the empty brush, with metal coolers slotted between them and somebody's transistor radio throwing static into the air.
A woman in an expensive, tailored jacket stood near the back, holding a paper plate of brisket.
Every single one of them turned around when the padlock clicked off the hasp.
Zaroff stood at the gate himself, holding a heavy maglite, while his people stripped me naked.
"Sixty minutes from when you clear the lights," he said.
"I'll be counting them out loud for these folks, so don't imagine I'm going to lose track.
" He tipped his chin toward the black space past the trailers. "Go on."
I looked over his shoulder at the row of faces.
They wanted me to bolt for the horizon. Instead, I walked out of that yellow light in absolutely no hurry. Behind me, the radio started up, playing some country rock anthem, and someone popped the cork on some champagne while everyone else cheered.
Enjoy your party, asshole, I thought as I sped up my pace. It'll be your last.
I stepped into the brush and the shadows.
Honestly? I was fucking thrilled. All week I'd been begging for the chance to get my hands on Zaroff, and then his men went and did half the work for me.
Idiots.
The play was simple. I'd swing wide, let them watch the ridge. Then I'd hook the arc back around and hit them from the south, straight off the gravel road. They expected me to run for the ranch, for safety, for freedom. The last thing they expected was for me to come for them.
They'd lined the stock trailers nose-to-tail on the west edge of the gravel. There was a tiny gap at the hitch between the second and third trailers. A small man could go through it sideways.
I'd crawl right under the flatbed with the work lights. The glare would blind those spectator pricks, and I'd pull Zaroff down right in front of his own paying guests.
Sierra had probably put a rifle in John’s hands by now. I'd have bet anything on it. The old man would haul that rifle all the way out here, ready to break himself in half, only to find the mess already made. He'd yell at me for it. I'd let him.
I'd let him do anything he wanted if it meant I got to keep him.
My tongue felt like sandpaper. It had felt like that since the pen, and there was nothing out here to fix it, so I quit thinking about it. I kept my stride steady toward the ridge like the prey they'd paid to see.
The cold had been coming up off the desert floor since before they cut the padlock. My nerves went haywire. My legs started shaking, not from the cold, and not from fear, but from whatever cocktail they'd pumped into my neck.
A mesquite branch hung low across my path. I reached out with my right hand to shove it aside. My splinted hand took the weight, and the entire night flashed blinding white.
Fuck, that hurt.
I bit down on my own forearm, right above the tape, and forced the scream back down my throat. My knees buckled, but I refused to hit the dirt.
I reached for my throat and missed the weight of Nimue. Nine years we'd been together, and the one time I put her down was the one time I'd let someone get the drop on me.
Never again, I thought. When I get back, I'm never letting Nimue or John out of my sight again.
The moon came up high enough to turn everything gray. I was starting my arc south when I saw the tracks. They came in from the west, slicing right across my line of sight, heading straight toward the trailers. They were the only new thing on all this empty ground, right between me and the yard.
I knelt to get a better look. They were deep enough that the heel had punched a real crater into the dirt.
Long strides, longer than mine, which annoyed me on principle.
And he'd walked dead-straight across the flattest, brightest stretch of ground for a mile.
The kind of spot where some bored prick with a scope on the flatbed would sweep just to pass the time.
The brush offered perfect cover just yards away, but whoever this was had walked straight through the open like nothing out here could touch him.
And he'd done it twice. There were two lines out there, not one, the same boot and the same crater heel, laid down a stride apart and pointed opposite ways. He'd walked in toward the lights, and then he'd walked back out.
Someone had snapped a branch clean off a mesquite well above my own head. I tried to prop myself up with my right hand to get closer and almost passed out.
I tried using my left hand, but my head tilted at a useless angle. So I went flat on my chest, naked on the cold gravel, cradling my busted hand against my ribs, keeping my one good eye inches from the dirt. In the shadow, the print was a gray smear with a hole punched in the middle.
I had to feel it. Was the edge fresh or crumbling? I touched it with my splinted hand and felt nothing but tape. My left came down too heavily and crushed the edge of the print.
I'd ruined the track. Fuck.
The drug was still sloshing in my veins, and the knot over my right ear was hot and swelling, expanding into whatever brain cells I had left.
They'd broken me. I was going to die out here in the dark because five guys with a bat had beaten the only useful part of me to mush.
I almost missed the white scrap.
It was hovering on my blind side. I pushed up onto my knees to start back toward the yard, and it flickered in the dead half of my face. I didn't see it at first. Then the wind blew, the white shifted, and the movement caught the edge of my good eye.
I had to wrench my whole neck around to look.
Someone had knotted a scrap of white cloth around a mesquite branch above me.
Nothing I'd tracked on this ground stood tall enough to reach it.
I dragged my feet under me, which hurt about as much as everything else had that night, hooked the branch down with my good hand, and worked the knot loose with my teeth.
Gauze.
I brought it closer to my nose and sniffed. Sweat, skin, cedar, well water, and the warm, heavy scent that lived under John’s beard. It was soaked deep into the cotton and dried there. It wasn't just a faint whiff; it was the smell of every hour the man had worn it.
Big John.
I stood there, naked in the middle of the desert, shut my good eye, pressed his bandage against my face, and inhaled him until my chest ached.
Bite when you need. I'm right here.
I had the cloth in my teeth before I even realized my mouth was open.
I turned it over. The dried blood formed a perfect ring. It ran thick along one side, then stopped, leaving the center of the cotton clean. I'd made that mark on his chest, and now it was tied to a branch on the only straight line anybody had walked across this ground tonight.
Back in the pen, they'd had everything. But now John was out in the dark.
Both those lines were his. Somewhere east of me, past anything I could see from here, he'd stopped and turned around and come back.
How close he came to that light before he turned was anybody's guess.
I saw it anyway. All that height standing dead still in the dark at the edge of the yellow, looking at those rows of chairs and a fat little radio and rows of men waiting to be entertained, and then turning around and walking away from it.
The radio was still going. Nobody in that yard had so much as looked up.
He was out there somewhere, waiting for me to get to him.
Or waiting for Zaroff to find him first.
For nine years, I had nothing anybody could take from me. I found out I did the second I held that bandage. I had never, in my entire miserable life, been as dangerous as I was standing there.
Zaroff had a spot saved on that necklace for my fangs.
Fine.
I'd drag him down into the dirt of his own yard and rip his throat out with my teeth. I'd take those trophies off his neck, tear his teeth right out of his skull, and carry them back through the dark in my good hand to drop them right into John's palms before I'd let him touch my man.
I closed my fist around the gauze.
John and me were going to have words about this. But those words would happen after I kissed him, and after Zaroff was rotting in the desert alone and toothless.
I glanced back the way I'd meant to go. I could still do it. Still circle around, try to kill Zaroff on my own. But I might fail. I might get caught again, or I might be back there while Zaroff was out here finding and killing Big John and whoever else had come to help him.
I could stick to the plan and maybe have my revenge, or I could listen to the message Big John had tied to that branch: I'm here, little one. Come find me. Let's do this together.
At least, that was what I hoped he meant.
I turned my back on the compound and the pit, and I started west into the dark, walking the line Big John had walked out on.
I didn’t get far before the radio quit.
It stopped in the middle of a verse, and I stopped with it, one foot still off the ground. An hour. That was what the silence was. Zaroff had counted it out loud for his paying friends the way he said he would, and now he was done counting.
Then the light came.
It swung wide off the flatbed and crawled out across the flat, and I was standing in the middle of it in the brightest stretch of ground for a mile.
Somebody shouted. The shot came half a second behind it and went past my head close enough to hear, and it wasn’t a warning.
Then the horses came off the gravel, spreading wide because they didn’t know yet which way I’d break.
I ran.
Not away. Anybody can run away. I ran the line, straight down the middle of his light, toward the man who’d left it for me.