Page 81 of Coyote

Linc kicked his door open and went out into the ditch, and I pushed Sarah out behind him and came out on top of her. A seam of heat tore up my right side, but the stitches held.

Linc came up over me with his rifle already up and fired twice across the hood, and by the sedan a man went down and stayed down. Then a round kicked Linc's leg out from under him, and he dropped into the grass beside us with his teeth bared, and the blood came up through his jeans black in the sun.

My bag was in my hand. I had no memory of taking it off the floorboard. I cut the denim open with the shears, and it was the left thigh, in and out, the exit two fingers off the femoral. Two fingers the other way and I'd have been kneeling on his groin in the grass watching him go gray. Dark blood, welling steadily. Not bright. Not jumping. The artery was intact, and I said so out loud, mostly to Linc.

"Sarah. Hands here, stacked, all your weight on them. Don't let up because he complains."

"I won't." She put her hands where mine had been without a flinch, and I loved her so much in that second it was hard to see straight.

The bed of the truck was already empty. I never saw Coyote leave it.

The rifles on the rise fired again, and then one of them stopped. A man up there started screaming, high and continuous, and then the second rifle stopped, and then the screaming stopped too, all inside the time it took me to tear open a packing roll with my teeth.

"Did I get one?" Linc's face was gray. His hands were folded across his chest.

"You got one."

"Good." He let his head fall back into the grass and looked at the sky. "Rafe's going to be pissed about the truck."

"You're about to spend a month in Sierra's front room getting fed every hour on the hour," I said, packing the exit wound while Sarah bore down. "The truck's the least of your problems."

The last man broke from behind the sedan and ran for the culvert. He had an open road ahead of him. He was young, and he was fast, and none of that was going to save him, because I knew what was coming off that rise behind him.

Coyote pounced on him and they hit the blacktop together. Coyote’s knife went in three times, and the man's heels quit working against the road. The fourth went in after he'd already stopped, and I felt that one somewhere under my sternum.

My thumb stayed on the packing in Linc's thigh. The pressure under my hand never changed. I didn't call out to him, and by the time he stood up and spat on the body, my back teeth ached from the set of my jaw.

Sarah had her weight stacked on Linc's thigh and her chin up over the lip of the ditch the whole time. She didn't look away. Some useless part of me wished she would, and a truer part of me was glad she saw exactly what stood between this family and that man. Both parts were mine, and I'd quit trying to talk myself out of either one.

Coyote slid into the ditch, bloody to the elbow, more of it dried on his cheek. Nimue lay flat and tight against his throat. He put his arms around me, buried his face in my neck, and inhaled.

Then I caught his wrist and turned his forearm over. A graze ran along the top of it, shallow and ugly, full of grit.

"You're hit."

"Grazed."

"You're next after Linc."

"After Linc," he said, and went back up on the road to make sure the bodies were dead.

He came back with his head cocked at the wreck, and he walked the length of it once before he said anything, dragging two fingers along the holes in the driver's door.

"Engine. Tire. Glass. Door," he said. "Nothing in the bed. Nothing on the tailgate. Look at it, big man. They stopped the truck, then they went at the one with the rifle, and they left me alone." He crouched and put his thumb in a hole in the fender. "That's not four men who came out here to kill. That's four men who came out here to load something."

"Load what?"

"Me." He wiped his thumb clean on his jeans. "Taking me was the job. Everything else was just clearing the road."

I finished the knot on Linc's thigh without looking up.

When the dressing was tied off and holding, Sarah climbed into the wrecked cab and worked the radio herself, and her voice only started shaking after she'd let go of the handset. Winston made it out to us fast, with two trucks, a deputy, and no siren. Joe came in behind him in the ranch's other truck. Sarah's call had gone out to everybody with a radio, and Rafe had put somebody on the road within a minute of hearing it. Winston stood in the road with his thumbs in his belt, looked at the sedan, the rise, the four dead men, and then at me.

"Attempted robbery on a county road," he said. "Occupants defended themselves. That'll hold up, and most of it's even true, which helps." He rubbed the back of his neck and looked down the blacktop toward town. "Get your wounded out of here before somebody from the state shows up and starts asking me things I'd rather not answer."

Linc I wanted on Sierra's table inside the hour. The pulse at his ankle was strong, his foot was warm, and he'd keep the leg and everything under it. He wasn't going to be walking on it for a month at the earliest, and when I told him that, he took it worse than he'd taken the bullet. We lifted him onto blankets in the deputy's truck, and he held my sleeve a second.

"Doc. She okay?"