Page 13 of Ransom
The relief came in under the shame, quiet and ugly. Coyote was here. Coyote was always, in the end, the answer. Whatever I had done in that shack would stop belonging to me the moment we tied him up, because the next set of decisions wouldn't be mine to make alone. I wanted that. I hated that I wanted that.
"Nobody knows. And nobody's going to know."
"I know."
"You don't count."
"I never count. That's why people tell me things." He crouched beside Winston and tilted his head. He studied Winston like the world was a puzzle and he'd lost the picture on the box a long time ago. "Help me tie him up. Nimue likes him, but Nimue likes everybody right before she bites them."
"Nimue doesn't bite. She's not venomous."
"Everything with a mouth bites, Ransom." Coyote snapped his teeth an inch from my nose and cackled when I didn't flinch.
I got the rope from Galahad's saddle while Coyote rolled Winston onto his stomach and pulled his wrists together behind his back. He went over too easily. He looked smaller than he had four hours ago.
Coyote hummed as he worked, bright and tuneless, the kind of sound a man made while cooking breakfast or washing a truck.
"Hands first," I said. "Then ankles."
"I know how to tie a man up." Coyote sounded offended.
"You know how to tie a man up for fun. This is different. This is also fun." He looped the rope around Winston's wrists and cinched it with a knot that would've made a rodeo hand weep. "More fun, actually. He can't safe word."
"Jesus Christ."
"What? I'm being thorough." He ran the rope down to Winston's ankles, pulled them together, tied them off just as cheerfully, then sat back and admired his work like he'd just finished wrapping a gift. He patted Winston on the back. "There. Comfortable?"
Winston did not respond on account of being unconscious.
"He's not going to answer you," I said.
"Rude." Coyote leaned down and pressed his ear to Winston's back. "Still breathing. Good heartbeat. Very strong. Like a horse." He sat up. "When he wakes up, can I be the one holding the knife?"
"There's no knife."
Coyote stared at me. "How are you going to kill him without a knife?"
"We're finding out what he knows first."
"And then the knife."
"And then we figure out what to do with him."
"Ransom." Coyote put a hand on my arm with the kind of seriousness reserved for bad news. "You cannot kill a man without a plan. What are we doing? Throat? Belly? Do we take pieces first? I need to know these things. I need to prepare emotionally."
"You need to prepare emotionally to kill someone."
"Yes. It's intimate. You should respect that." He pulled a blade from somewhere I didn't see and flipped it between his fingers.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. "Put that away."
He put it between his teeth instead.
We dragged Winston into Coyote's camp, less a camp than a den: a canvas lean-to strung between two pines, a fire pit ringed with stones, a bedroll that stank of wood smoke and snake, and a collection of bones hung from the branches on lengths of wire that clicked against each other in the wind. Coyote had told the new arrivals at the ranch that they were human. They were javelina, but nobody had ever called his bluff.
We propped Winston against the trunk of the larger pine and Coyote checked the knots again, tugging each one with a focus that bordered on tender.
"You really did fuck him," Coyote said, quieter now, the manic edge gone. He sat cross-legged in front of Winston, tilted his head, and studied his face. Coyote studied things either not at all or completely. "He smells like you. Not just sex. You."
