Page 86 of Coyote

I spat on his boots.

"Load him."

They took me down past the mare. She threw her head at the blood smell and pulled against the tie, and one of them swung wide of her, cursing, and then I couldn't see her anymore.

"Doc? You got a band-aid?"

Cruz leaned in my doorway, holding his thumb out in front of him like it belonged to somebody else. "It's stupid, I know. It's a splinter. Mateo said don't bother you, but it's in there deep and I can't get it with my teeth. And Sierra won't let me touch his tweezers on account of the last time, which was one time—"

I had been counting suture packs into the lid of Sierra's kit for the second time that hour. Enough for a few limbs and a scalp, if nobody bled out while I worked. The sun was off the ridge. The lantern was burning. For an hour I'd been telling myself that forty minutes up and forty minutes back was a soft number on a dark trail.

Cruz was supposed to be on that trail with him.

The shears slipped out of my fingers and hit the dirt floor. "Where is he?"

"Who?"

"Coyote."

"How would I know?" Cruz turned his thumb toward the light. "Haven't seen him since breakfast."

Cold ran up the back of my neck and down both arms. I shoved off the step, and pain tore through the right side low where the stitches ran, deep enough to lock the breath in my chest. I braced one hand flat on the shelf.

The kit lay open on the step where I'd left it. I latched it and hauled it up.

"Doc?" Cruz backed out of the doorway with his thumb forgotten at his side. "Doc, you're scaring me."

"Where's Sierra?"

"Kitchen—"

He was still holding his thumb out when I blew past him.

Cruz overtook me before I had even made the middle of the yard, his boots hammering the packed dirt, hollering for Sierra. I resented his knees. Thirty years and a set of cracked ribs between us, and I felt every one of them.

By the time I reached the bottom step, Sierra had already shouldered the door open, a dish towel still draped over his shoulder.

"He's not on the ranch," I said.

"Who?" Sierra asked.

"Coyote. He's gone."

Sierra pulled the towel off his shoulder and dropped it over the rail. "The arroyo," he said.

"He took the snake up to the cave. He told me he'd take Cruz."

"You know the way?"

I nodded and turned toward the barn.

I beat him to the barn and got two steps inside the double doors before I stopped.

The tack hung on the wall where it had hung since Coyote first walked me down there. Saddle. Blanket. Bridle. I could name every strap. He'd tightened a cinch in front of me and Linc had checked one behind him, and I'd have bet my license I remembered the order of it.

Yet I stood there with my hands open and my ribs pulling, and I could not make my body do one useful thing with any of it.

Sierra came in behind me, pulled a heavy wool blanket off the wall, and threw it over the gelding's back in one smooth motion.