22. Twenty-One
The glue on the medical tape tasted of bitter tin.
I bit another strip off the roll, the fibers catching in my teeth, and smoothed it down onto the cold steel of the rifle stock.
The tacky side faced up, a finger-width from the three strips before it.
I needed to find the strips in the dark without looking down.
"You've been tearing at that tape for twenty minutes."
Ransom lay flat on the ledge above my left shoulder. I didn't look up. I couldn't risk the dirt sliding under my boots.
"He'll be bleeding," I whispered. My throat clicked when I swallowed.
"You don't know that."
"I know what condition Zaroff sends them back in."
Ransom didn't answer. Nobody up here had argued with me since we dragged ourselves out of the barn.
The heavy barrel of the rifle pressed into my thighs, pinning my legs to the dirt. I'd lost feeling in my legs. If I shifted to get the blood moving, the gravel would rattle, and the only sound I wanted in this gap was the one I'd been straining to hear since the sun went down.
The cold from the stone had crept through my jeans and set into my hip joints.
Every time I tried to take a full breath, my ribs flared with a sharp, binding stitch.
I kept my breathing shallow, my chest barely moving.
Under my shirt, the bite over my heart throbbed with a hot, steady itch.
I pressed two bare fingers against it, feeling the hard, swollen knot of the wound underneath.
It didn't stop the itching, but the pressure kept me from scratching it raw.
At my right hip, Sierra's canvas kit lay open, its metal lid folded back into the dirt.
I knew the layout by touch: the rough weave of the gauze rolls on the left, the heavy rubber strap of the tourniquet coiled across the top.
I'd set it up so I could grab what I needed in the pitch-black without a single glance.
Out past the narrow gray edges of the pass, the valley ran flat and featureless for a mile until it hit the yellow lights of Zaroff's compound.
They had the radio on. The music drifted across the dirt, thin and tinny, but clear enough that I could hear the melody.
Someone honked a car horn twice, and the laughter flared up again.
I kept my ears locked onto it, trying to drown out the silence, trying not to listen for the heavy, rhythmic thud of hooves.
They were still drinking. Drinking meant they weren't done. Or it meant they'd put a bullet in him an hour ago and left the radio playing while they finished their drinks over his body.
A wave of sickness hit my stomach. Earlier, I'd tied a strip of my own dirty gauze to a low mesquite branch and walked away. That was all the communication I had left for him. A white rag fluttering on a thorn, and then a mile-long retreat to sit in the dark with a gun I could barely carry.
Above me, the sole of Ransom's boot ground against the limestone. "Doc."
"I'm awake."
"When he comes through that pass—"
"If," I corrected.
"When he comes down, are you going to be able to work? Because Sierra's kit is your job. The rest is mine."
"It's both."
"Uh-huh." Cloth scraped rock above me as he shifted onto his elbows.
I kept my eyes fixed on the gray gap of the pass, two hundred yards away.
"Left of the sternum," I said. "Fourth intercostal space, two inches off the midline.
There's no wind in this pass. I'll have him inside two hundred yards.
The round will open the right ventricle.
He'll stay on his feet for six seconds, maybe eight, because his brain won't have received the news yet.
Then his knees will buckle, he'll drop into the dirt, and he'll drown in his own blood with his eyes open. It takes some time. I’ll stand over him until the last beat, and I won't move. "
The pass fell quiet again. Farther down, near the bottom of the draw, a horse stamped once in the brush, and Cruz murmured something low until it quit.
"When did you decide that?" Ransom asked.
"In the barn. While Sierra was saddling a horse I was too weak to climb onto."
I waited for him to call me a liar, or a hypocrite, or a fool. He didn't. He breathed out through his nose and lowered himself back onto his stomach.
"All right, Doc," he said. “Shot’s yours.”
Then the radio quit in the middle of a verse.
The silence hit hard when the music cut out. A mile of empty dirt swallowed the sound all at once, leaving nothing but the hard, hot thump of my own blood behind my ears. No laughter. No horn. Just the cold.
Then, out in the dark, a rifle cracked.
I heard Ransom's boots scrape the rock above me as he pulled himself up, then go perfectly still.
Nobody down the line made a sound. The cold in my hips vanished, replaced by a sudden, scalding rush of heat.
I pressed my palm hard against the bite mark on my chest, gripping the rifle stock with my other hand, and forced myself to breathe through my nose, waiting out the silence.
Then I heard him.
Bare feet slapped against the hard clay out in the dark.
Slap-thud, slap-thud. The rhythm was broken.
One heel hit hard, the other barely touched, a desperate, limping pace that refused to slow for the pain.
Behind that ragged drumming came the horses.
A lot of them. A wide, rumbling line of iron shoes striking stone, fan-spreading across the desert and closing fast.
I slid my thumb onto the cold metal of the safety and clicked it off.
Coyote came through the mouth of the pass at a dead sprint. The moonlight caught him all at once, stark and greasy gray against the dark rock walls.
He was completely naked. Dark mud and filth caked him from ankle to hip, and the right side of his face was a mess.
The cheekbone and brow swelled into a gray lump, burying his right eye.
Silver duct tape wrapped his right forearm, wrist to knuckle, splinting it against a wooden paint stirrer.
His exposed fingers had swollen blue and useless.
But his good left hand was clenched around a dirty wad of cotton gauze. My gauze. He had carried it a mile through the dark in the only hand he could still close.
Every instinct I had as a doctor slammed into me: the urge to jump down, to splint, to clean, to check his pupils, to stop the bleeding.
I had to physically force my jaw shut to keep from calling out to him.
He was below me, running for his life, and the only help I could give him was to stay frozen.
He ran straight for the rusted flatbed truck we'd parked across the narrowest throat of the gap, and he didn't look back.
A second later, the riders hit the mouth of the pass. They crowded into the gray opening, ten or twelve of them, horses shoulder to shoulder. Zaroff rode in the middle of them, rifle raised, a white headlamp strapped to his hat brim, the beam cutting the dust.
"Now," Ransom whispered.
Below, Cruz rode into the mouth of the pass and closed the gap behind the last of them. Two riders were at the rear now, rock on both sides, nothing open behind them.
Then Mateo started firing from the shelf above, and the sound echoed until my teeth vibrated in my jaw.
A horse screamed, high and thin, and dumped its rider into the gravel.
The animal next to it reared, its leg slamming into the rock wall with a sickening crack, and the rider shrieked, dropping his gun to clutch at his shattered leg.
Above me, Ransom fired one shot, a pause, then another, his movements slow and mechanical.
With each crack of his rifle, a man slackened and slipped out of his saddle.
The riders piled into each other, the narrow gap turning into a thrashing knot of rearing horses and shouting men.
The trap worked exactly as we'd drawn it in Rafe's office: the number was never going to matter, because the throat of the pass only allowed three of them abreast.
Down in the dirt, I saw Sierra scramble out from behind the flatbed. He ran into the open, grabbed Coyote by the arm, and dragged him behind the heavy iron wheels just as three rounds punched through the truck's sideboard.
Every muzzle in that gap turned on us, on Sierra, on the rocks, on the truck. Not one of them was pointed at the naked man in the dirt.
I lost track of Zaroff. My chest tightened, a hard knot of panic rising in my throat.
A rider broke free from the tangle on the right, his horse hugging the rock wall, driving straight toward Sierra's exposed back. He had a shotgun, the barrels pointing right at Sierra's head.
My cheek dropped onto the cold wood of the stock. I put the front sight on the shotgun's receiver and pressed the trigger.
The rifle kicked hard against my chest. The shotgun exploded out of the rider's hands and spun away into the dark. He clutched his bloody fingers to his ribs, pulled his horse around, and rode back out into the open.
I hadn't killed him.
Before I registered the relief, I had worked the bolt, chambered another round, and settled the sights back onto the horses.
Zaroff was still in his saddle in the middle of the screaming horses. He had the rifle up to his shoulder, swinging the muzzle toward the flatbed that hid Sierra and Coyote.
I put the sight on his hands.
I didn't remember deciding to do it. I remembered the trigger breaking, the loud crack, and Zaroff's rifle flying apart in a spray of silver metal and splinters.
Zaroff came out of the saddle sideways and landed on his shoulder in the dirt.
He rolled onto his knees, his hat gone, the headlamp lying in the dirt and casting a long, bright beam across the bloody gravel.
He hunched over his right hand, cradling it against his stomach, rocking back and forth as he let out a thin, wet whistle.
Around him, the gunfire began to taper off. Then it stopped entirely. My ears buzzed with a high, sharp ring, and the smell of burnt sulfur hung thick and heavy in the stagnant air of the cut.
Ransom called out names from the ledge. Mateo answered him. Cruz answered him. Sierra didn't answer at first, and then he finally did, and the tight band around my ribs finally loosened enough for me to breathe.
I stood up. My legs burned from hip to heel, but they held. I climbed down out of the rocks and walked into the open path, holding the rifle flat across my chest.
Nobody spoke to me as I passed. A horse snorted a fine red mist near my shoulder. My boots crunched loudly on the dry gravel as I walked out onto the flat dirt of the pass. I stopped in front of Zaroff.
The air around him smelled of sweat, cheap cologne, gun oil, and the sharp, sour tang of a man who knew he was about to die.
Zaroff looked up. The white beam of his discarded headlamp illuminated the left side of his face. His right hand was a shredded, dripping mess between his knees. The necklace of boar tusks around his throat swung forward, clinking together like dry teeth.
I raised the rifle, brought my cheek down to the wood, and aligned the sights with the fourth space between his ribs, two inches left of the midline.
I pulled the trigger back until I felt the sear catch. Zaroff stared straight up the dark of the barrel, his eyes wide, the realization of what I was about to do finally sinking into his face. Let him look. I wanted him to see it.
"Wait." Coyote limped up beside me wearing nothing but Sierra's shirt. He sniffed and drew his wrist under his nose.
My finger loosened on the trigger, but I didn't let go. "I'm not letting him walk. Not after everything he's done."
"I know, big man." Coyote put a hand on my shoulder. "A quick death is a kindness he never gave anyone. He doesn't deserve it."
I glared down at Zaroff in the dirt, bleeding from his hand, broken, defeated by a narrow pass, a pacifist, and Coyote.
"You're right," I said and lowered the gun. "A bullet is too quick for him."