Page 88 of Coyote

Sierra straightened up slowly. He looked down toward the county road, where all the tracks pointed. "You don't know that."

"Zaroff has him."

He looked at the drag marks again and quit arguing.

I started limping back down the trail.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

I reached into my pocket and closed my fist around the cold metal of the flatbed key.

Past the river. A cattle gate with a chain on it. Follow the wash until I saw the lights of Zaroff’s camp.

I could finish it.

For five months I'd slept on that ground. I knew how the road ran in and which trailer covered it. The trailers, the pens, which way each of them faced. The wash bent behind the burn pile and ran shallow enough to cross on foot.

"Sierra."

He looked up.

"Give me the rifle."

His hands stopped on the bolt. He stood in the gathering dark, holding the weapon across his chest.

"If Zaroff puts himself in front of me," I said, "I'm going to kill him."

Four times in my life somebody had knocked me out, and all four times I came back fast and mean and already swinging.

Not this time.

I surfaced one inch at a time. Every time I neared the top, it dropped me back down. My tongue felt swollen and tasted like dry paste. I told my left hand to close, and it closed half a second later.

Then my stomach turned over. I threw up, and I couldn't move my head fast enough to miss my own shoulder.

That was how I knew.

A beating didn't do that. I'd been beaten by professionals and I'd been beaten by drunks, and a beating hurt in the places it landed and left the rest sharp. This was all of me at once, and almost none of it was pain. Parts of me switched back on in an order I hadn't picked.

Somebody had drugged me.

When I could hold a thought without it sliding sideways, I started at the top of my body and worked down.

There was a fat, hot knot above my right ear where a club had connected. My right eye was swollen shut. I opened the left one and waited for the world to come back into focus.

My teeth were all present. I ran my tongue over the ridges twice to be sure. I tasted copper and boot leather, and I remembered exactly whose ankle I'd chewed through and felt decent about it. It wasn't nothing.

My knees were already scabbed over. Scabs took hours. I'd been out for a while.

I lifted my right hand off the dirt and looked at it and wished I hadn't. It didn't look like mine. It was swollen and purple across the back, the fingers fat and wrong, radiating enough heat that I could feel it two inches off with my good palm. The knuckles sat in a crooked ridge. I tried to flex the fingers and found a tiny bit of give before a white spike of pain went straight up my forearm, putting a fresh coat of sweat on my forehead. Broken in three places, maybe four. It was my knife hand, the hand I did everything with.

The last thing I remembered was the ridge: my cheek flat on the cold rock, gravel in my teeth, arms hauled back, and Zaroff putting two fingers under my chin to tilt my face up so he could see it. The sun was off the high peaks by then, but there was still a purple light in the sky.

After that, I had nothing.

I was the best tracker in this corner of the state, and I couldn't have said at gunpoint how I'd gotten here, or how to get home.

The hand would knit. Bone did that on its own. But the other thing, the missing miles, the blank space where my memories should have been, was gone. I'd have traded the hand to have those hours back.