Page 90 of Coyote

"Show it to me, Coyote."

I lifted my right arm and took my time about it.

His mouth tightened, his brow came down, and he hissed through his teeth.

"Who did that?" he asked, not looking back.

The man on his left shifted his feet in the gravel. "Bern, boss. Up on the ridge."

Zaroff stood up, brushing the yellow dust off his pants with two neat strokes. His hand came back up to the tusks. He wasn't angry. He was disappointed.

"Bern." Zaroff stopped working the tusks.

"He was on the dirt, boss," the guard said, watching his own feet. "The kid was biting his boots. Screaming like a wildcat. Bern had to lay him out."

Zaroff's eyes stayed on my swollen knuckles. "Tape it. Find a splint, bind it tight, and do it now. And tell Bern to stay in the bunkhouse. If I see his face before sunrise, I'll take the difference out of his skin."

"You plan to hunt me," I said.

He looked back at me through the wire.

"You heard me," I said. I forced my mouth into a grin, feeling the scab on my lip split and the warm copper run down my chin. "I know the drill.”

The guards shifted, uneasy.

Zaroff grinned. “I've got forty people driving in from town tonight who have paid good money to come help me celebrate my birthday. You’re the main event. You should be honored.”

I looked over his shoulder.

Out beyond his head lay the gravel lot, the rusted stock trailers, the concrete drainage basin with the truck hoods bolted around the lip, and the dirt road winding south. Past all of it was the empty space. Just greasewood and limestone, the ridge dry and pale in the late light, and past that the mountains, blue and flat. The same ones I looked at every summer on the Pae Saco porch.

Zaroff followed my eye down to the road and let his hand fall off the tusks.

"Nobody's coming to save you." He tipped his chin toward it. "Nobody in this county is stupid enough to bring a fight to my doorstep. Not to save one scrawny tracker."

I glared at him. “Then you’d better be right. If you’re wrong, I’ll be in your dark with you, and I’ll be the one who can see.”

He laughed again, loud and sharp. "Look around you. Even if those idiots down at the ranch did come for you, they’re outgunned. They’d be riding to their death. You think they’re going to ride out here and die for some feral thing that's half man, half beast? They didn’t come when I dropped a body at their doorstep. Hell, they couldn’t stop me when I walked through their fucking front door to smother one of my own. What makes you think you’re so goddamn special that they come all the way out here to die for you?"

I swallowed and said nothing. What was there to say? He was right. If Linc and Sierra and Ransom rode up through that narrow pass to break me out, they’d be dead before morning. I didn’t want them to come save me. Not if it cost them their lives. But that didn’t mean I was going to lie down and die like Zaroff wanted.

Zaroff tapped the tusks twice against his collar. "I’ll tell you what. Since I’m such a good sport, I’ll make you a deal. The long run gets you a day’s start. This isn’t the long run. This is one night, my ground, my guests. You last until dawn, you’re free to go. Nobody ever has."

Zaroff smiled at me one last time and stood.

"See you later," he said, and turned his back on the cage.

The two guards unlocked the gate and came in to fix the hand.

They didn't ask for my permission, and I didn't offer any help. One of them drove a heavy knee into the center of my back, pinning me to the dirt, while the other grabbed my swollen right wrist, laid a flat wooden paint stirrer along the palm, and began to wrap.

He wrapped it with silver duct tape, pulling it tight enough that the glue bit into my skin, binding the split wood against the broken bones from my knuckles all the way to the middle of my forearm. He did it with the same careless grease-monkey focus he'd use to fix a cracked bumper. My hand made a wet, grinding sound inside the tape.

I sat there with my arm cradled against my ribs, breathing through the nausea, and thought about the most useless thing possible: John's hands.

I thought about how he'd have looked at the skin before he ever laid a finger on it. How he'd have talked me through the pain, telling me exactly what he was going to do before he did it, and how, once he'd set the splint, he'd have laid his big, dry palm flat against my chest and left it there until the shaking stopped.

It was a stupid thing to think about in a cage. But I couldn't stop it.