CHAPTER 21 #2
He talked me through the local anesthetic and the temporary field closure in a voice as flat as the second sentence of a police report.
Small wheals along the wound edge. Time for the numbness to take.
Then bite of the needle, angle, depth, wrist turn, knot, snip.
He said plainly that this was delayed-evacuation care, not a substitute for a clinician, and that a deputy medic would recheck it as soon as the road was clear.
The needle met resistance the first time — live skin admitting a foreign curve — and then came out on the other side clean.
I turned my wrist the way he had taught me on the pad, brought the edges together without strangling them, tied, and cut the tail.
My hands were steadier than they had been an hour ago drying plates.
Being asked to do one precise thing took the shake out of my fingers.
Four stitches.
Between the third and the fourth he said, “Diversion. Boyd's main move is tomorrow. Roe was meant to burn a hole in my sleep.”
Between the fourth and the fifth his hand came up and lay over the back of mine on the needle-driver.
I almost dropped it.
“You did that well.”
I set the needle down.
“Don't. Don't say it like the courthouse.”
He looked at me a full second. The propane sconce did the small yellow work it did at that hour. His storm-gray eyes went the color of tin.
“Sweetheart. It wasn't like the courthouse.”
“No?”
“It was better.”
I swallowed. My thumb went to my opposite palm without asking me — silent, small, the metronome I had thought I had left in Denver with everything else that fit in a briefcase.
I stopped it. He watched me stop it. He did not look away and he did not say anything about it.
He was going to let it be mine. That was what the second Saturday and the wedding dinner and the porch coffee on Thursday had all been rehearsals for. He needed no label to register a thing.
I picked the needle back up. Two more stitches. I put them in. I did not look at his face for either.
I covered the closure with a sterile non-stick pad and a pressure wrap, loose enough to preserve color and sensation. A deputy medic would recheck it after the threat cleared.
“We're moving Marta up to the safe room in the morning. Before dawn.”
He shook his head one small time.
“You are staying here. I'm going down. You are not on the trail alone before sunrise.”
(we are not going. we are moving.)
I did not say it. It was not the moment.
He held his good hand out. I put the flannel from the back of the kitchen chair into it — the gray one he had let me sleep in twice and had not asked back — and he rolled the cuff over the gauze one-handed with his teeth.
He caught it on the tape and did not fuss.
He held the arm still against his ribs. He stood.
“Sat phone.”
“Porch or truck?”
“With me.”
At ten-fifteen, we moved to the porch with the sat phone.
He carried the sat phone out from the truck lockbox in his left hand.
His right forearm was bandaged and taped and pinned to his side inside the sling I had made him out of a strip of the kitchen linen because he would not go up to the bedroom for a proper one.
The porch faced west. The ridge in the red dusk.
A hem of black at the treeline where the sun had gone. Wind still coming off the SW.
Iron in the dust and iron in the air and — under the propane sconce light coming out through the front-room window — iron in the smear he had left on the doorframe I had not cleaned yet.
He dialed. The Iridium woke and the little screen went green in his hand. He put it to his ear.
Beau came through the way Beau always came through. Steady. CID-dry. Signal so clean I could hear the small consonants at the ends of his words, the way an ex-officer speaks when he has spent nine years telling other men things they do not want to hear.
“Got your text. Two teams inbound. If Boyd's people moved Roe as diversion, the main show is tomorrow, probably early.”
Luke said, “Give me a window.”
“Dawn to noon. Copy?”
“Copy.”
“Lucas. Get Marta up to the cabin safe room by seven. Cover Celia there yourself.”
Luke's eyes flicked to mine on the word Lucas.
My expression held.
He did not flinch.
“I will.”
“How is she.” Beau's voice on the tin syllables of the phone. Not softer. Just the sentence at another angle.
Luke did not turn his head to look at me. He said, “Steady.”
“Copy.”
“Brother. I'm sorry.”
“Come get us.”
The line went.
He set the phone flat on the porch rail with the antenna over the drop.
The porch sconce picked out the black on the doorframe.
Three days since I had opened the safe. Two days since he had told me the whole thing at this same rail, coffee going cold in two mugs, the propane sconce doing this same small yellow work on the boards under our feet.
One day of him rigging the perimeter I had walked with him at dawn and dusk and not asked about at midday. And now the arithmetic that had been running underneath the days had landed.
Beau on the phone had said Lucas into open air over a mountain that had not heard the name spoken since the man who owned it had bought this land with cash.
It had crossed the porch. It had passed both of us.
Neither of us had moved. I did not know what to do with the not-moving except to register it as fact and put it into the plat with the porch light and the woodshed line and Marta's route.
I thought — because I still wrote memos, because that was one of the parts of me the mountain had not disassembled and I was learning it would not be asked to — index the porch light, index the woodshed line, index Marta's route.
Tomorrow starts now.