Page 82 of Coyote

"She's okay. You put your head down."

Joe stood at his own tailgate the whole time with his jaw locked.

Sarah came around the tailgate, wiping her hands on a square of gauze too small for the job. Up close she smelled like lemon and cordite, and there was Linc's blood dried on her fingers. She looked past my shoulder at Coyote, who was crouched on the blacktop cleaning his knife on a dead man's jacket.

"Eleven months," she said. "The whole time, I kept thinking, when I find him, I'll bring him home. I kept your room. I kept buying that terrible coffee you like, so it'd be there." She hit my arm twice, hard. "You're already home. I watched it happen today. In a ditch, John. You knew exactly what this was, and you picked it anyway." She pressed the gauze flat in her fist. "I'm not going to pretend I understand. But I saw it. That'll have to be enough for both of us."

"Sare."

"Don't." Her chin was trembling. She grabbed two fists of my shirt anyway and pulled me down and held on hard. "You call me Sundays," she said into my collar. "Winston's giving my phone back today, so you've got no excuse. Sundays, John."

"Sundays," I agreed.

She let go, stepped back, and put her cardigan straight. Then she looked at Coyote again and raised her voice enough to reach him.

"Holidays," she said. "Both of you. Bring the snake."

Coyote thought it over. "She sleeps when it's cold."

"Then she'll be the easiest guest I've ever had." Sarah climbed into Winston's cruiser and pulled the door shut, and she didn't look back through the glass. I knew why. If she'd looked back, she'd have gotten out again, and we'd have had to start the whole goodbye over with less daylight.

I stood in the road until the blacktop was empty south of me.

Then I turned around and walked back. Coyote crouched over the man on the blacktop with both hands in the dead man's jacket, and he didn't look up until I closed my fist in his collar and hauled him onto his feet.

"You don't jump out of a moving truck," I said. "You don't do that again."

"He was going to—"

"I know what he was going to do."

Nimue slid across my knuckles. He hung there in my fist with his hands at his sides. He didn't twist my wrist, and he didn't drop me on my back, and either one would have taken him a second and a half.

"Okay," he said.

I opened my fist. My hands were steady.

"I'm going to kill him," he said.

"Good," I said. I put my hand flat against the back of his neck and held it there a second, and then I walked back toward Joe's truck.

The fucking screw went in crooked.

I backed it out, lined it up, and the point skated off again.

"Fuck this."

"Language," John said, not even looking up from his work.

Sierra had handed me the screwdriver at breakfast like he was doing me a favor. The hasp had torn clean off Nimue's crate, taking half the wood with it, and now I was sitting on the dirt floor of the equipment shed with the crate wedged between my knees, blood boiling.

Two days of work, and I had a pile of dry pine and a box of crooked screws to show for it. Linc was on the sofa in the main house with his leg mapped out in surgical marker, and Zaroff was in town somewhere with the air conditioning running, drinking cold water.

"You're not my mother." I dug the screw back out.

"No." John kept counting suture packs, dropping them one by one into the lid of Sierra's kit. "Your mother would've taken the screwdriver away from you by now."

He didn't lift his head, but the corner of his mouth twitched under his beard, and my chest pulled tight.