24. Twenty-Three
We brought him home in the flatbed with his head in my lap.
Cruz drove like the truck bed was stacked with eggs, and the road still found every rut it had.
Coyote slept through all of them. In the shed, I hung a headlamp on a nail and cut away the ruined tape.
Sierra carried the saline in from the barn refrigerator and stood over us holding the bag at shoulder height.
I slid the needle into the vein, and Coyote surfaced enough to pull against it.
"You're home," I said. "The line stays in. I told you I'd sit on your chest, and I will."
"Big man." His good hand crossed his body and closed on nothing at the base of his throat, where a snake should have been. His eyes stayed shut.
"She's in the cave. She's safe. When you can ride, we'll go get her."
The hand slid off his collarbone, and he sank back into sleep. I splinted the hand properly, and then I started on his feet. My knees ached after kneeling for so long, but I ignored them.
I woke him twice before dawn. The first time, he threatened to bite me. The second, he asked if Zaroff was dead, and I said yes, and he said good, and fell asleep again before the word ended. Both times his pupil came back level, faster on the second check.
Near dawn, I stretched out on my own bedroll, put my hand over the mark his teeth had left on my chest, and matched my breathing to his until sleep took me.
I reached across the bed and closed my hand around Coyote's shoulder, drawing him back against me. For five years, I'd been reaching across that space, braced to find it empty. Not anymore.
I lay there and breathed him in, eyes closed, and waited for the guilt. I gave it a full minute. I counted it out the way I'd count a pulse. Nothing came up but a voice, so pleased with itself that heat spread under my sternum. Told you, you big idiot.
I stretched my legs down onto a mattress that finally let my ankles rest on cotton instead of dangling in the draft.
Three days ago, this bed hadn't existed.
The room still smelled of raw pine and fresh sawdust. Cruz and Mateo and the rest had spent the last few days expanding the shed into a proper building that'd serve as the ranch's clinic and now our home.
Coyote lay heavy and loose on the mattress beside me, one knee hitched warm against my thigh, his splinted hand resting empty where his knife should have been.
Sierra had lifted it out of the dirt on that ridge and carried it down in his own belt.
Coyote hadn't had it in his hand since. The swelling had come down off his cheekbone and brow enough for his lashes to show again.
The fingers past the splint were pink and warm. I checked anyway. The nail blanched white under my thumb and had its color back in two seconds.
His feet were the worse job. I'd spent the first night on them with forceps and a headlamp, pulling cactus spines out of both soles, and I'd stopped counting somewhere in the left one. The cracks across his heels had finally closed enough to quit weeping.
"My fingers are fine," he said without opening his eyes.
Then he rolled over and buried his face in the hollow of my neck, breath hot on my throat, shifting his hips to keep his knees clear of my ribs. His hair tickled my nose.
"What day is it?" he mumbled against my collarbone.
"Sunday," I said, my hand settling over the fine hairs on the back of his neck.
The good eye opened. "Pancakes!"
Denim rustled and his boots scuffed the floor before I'd found the leverage to sit up. "Last one to the table is a rotten egg!"
"You can't run, little one."
"I can walk fast and you're old." He kissed me, finished dressing, and went out the door on the outside of both feet.
I sighed, smiled at the ceiling, and rolled out of bed.
Five minutes later, gravel crunched under my boots the whole way across the yard, and the smell of maple syrup and bacon fat reached me before I got to the porch.
Through the screen door, Linc was hollering from the front room about being starved to death by his own family, and Mateo growled back that card cheats didn't get syrup.
Mateo carried a plate through to him and came back with an empty one.
Pearl held the threshold, and her thick fur dragged across my shins as I stepped over her.
The screen door slapped shut behind me. Sierra flipped two pancakes without turning his head, stacked three on a plate, slid butter between the layers, and set the plate down in front of Coyote.
"You're late, hijo," Sierra said, and scraped the griddle. "But I'll start a few more for you. You'll have to get your own coffee today."
Coyote picked up his fork left-handed, tried to scoop up a pancake, and failed. I slid his plate over and started cutting them into bite-sized squares for him.
Cruz put his chin in his hand and sighed at us. "I wish someone would cut my pancakes for me like that."
"Get your own giant," Coyote said, pointing his fork at Cruz.
Cruz grinned and said, "I just might."
I set his knife and fork down on the plate, took his own knife out of my back pocket, and slid it across the table.
The bone handle stopped against the heel of his hand. He looked at it. Sierra quit scraping the griddle. Cruz stopped chewing.
Then he thumbed it open left-handed, checked the edge against his lip, quick and automatic, and put it away.
"You sharpened it," he said.
"Sierra sharpened it. I only carried it."
After the plates were cleared, I went to check Linc's thigh. It was dry, and his foot was warm, and the wound was closing nicely. He asked me when he could ride again and cursed at me when I told him the answer.
Then I sat sideways on a kitchen chair and held still under the cold steel of Sierra's scissors, small sharp tugs as each thread came free of the sealed skin. It held. It was going to scar in a jagged line crossing two older ones.
"Done," Sierra said, tapping the scissors against his palm. "You're a whole man again."
Coyote spoke from behind the chair. "He was always whole."
Sierra looked at me for a fraction of a second. Neither of us smiled where he could see us.
I followed the uneven scuff of Coyote's boots out to the far shed, where the morning heat was already working on the tin roof and the air hung thick with engine oil and solvent.
Zaroff's Sportster stood stripped to the bone on the concrete, frame on the stand, tank on the bench, the handlebars bare where his tusks had been wired on.
I leaned in the doorway and waited for whatever he was about to do.
Joe stood at the bench with a wrench in his fist. He set it down and wiped his palms on a rag, the only sound in the shed.
"You've had her all the way apart," Coyote said.
"Been working on it. Nothing else to do with my hands all week."
Coyote dragged his good palm along the bare steel, one pass, light, finished with her.
"Keep her."
Joe stopped wiping. "She's yours. You stole her fair."
"She was his. I don't want anything that was his except for what I've got." His shoulder brushed warm past mine. "Your hands are all over her, anyway. Build her into something else."
He stopped in the doorway on his way out, light behind him.
"I was wrong about you," he said.
Joe looked at the frame on the stand for a second, then at him. "Yeah," he said. "I figured that's what this was."
"She'll be blue!" Joe called after us.
"She'll be ugly!" Coyote called back.
By noon the sun had found the back of my neck, and Winston's cruiser came up the drive and stopped without him cutting the engine.
Rafe and I came down the steps to his window.
Coyote perched on the porch rail behind us, so still that the only thing telling me he was there was one scuff of his boot heel.
"County's wrapping it up," Winston said through the open window.
"A man walks barefoot at night across his own hunting ground, and the wildlife takes care of the rest. The file practically writes itself.
Nobody's going to read it twice." He slid his sunglasses down.
"The rest of his boys scattered before we got there.
Left the pens standing open. All of them. "
"Was anyone in them?" I said.
"Two." He kept his eyes forward when he said it. "Half starved. My deputies drove them to county the same way we've done everything else out here, which is to say quiet and without a lot of paperwork. Nobody's come asking after them yet."
"When they're discharged, send them here," I said. "There's a bed and a doctor, and nobody takes a name."
"I figured you'd say that." He put his elbow on the sill.
"Listen to me, Doc. That file closes because everybody who could open it has a reason not to.
My deputies counted twenty-eight folding chairs out in that yard.
Every one of those seats paid cash to sit at an illegal blood sport, and not one of those people is going to volunteer where they were.
As for the state of the deceased, there wasn't enough left of his hand or his mouth or his throat to argue with after the coyotes and the crows and three days of that sun.
Boys found his clothes out at the pass, which fits a man who'd been drinking. "
Behind me the rail creaked once. I kept my eyes on Winston's sunglasses and my hands loose at my sides.
"You need anything else from us?" Rafe asked at my shoulder.
"A quiet year would be something. I've stopped expecting one." He put the truck in gear, then stopped, eyes finding mine again. "Doc. The clinic. You licensed for this county?"
"I'm licensed in the state."
"Good. Because my deputies have big mouths, and they know where you are now, and there's a whole stretch of nothing east of here where folks are an hour from a hospital on a good day." He pushed the glasses back up. "So you know what you've signed yourself up for."
His dust drifted back over us, gritting between my teeth, sour with exhaust. Rafe put his glasses on and studied me.