Page 94 of Coyote

At my right hip, Sierra's canvas kit lay open, its metal lid folded back into the dirt. I knew the layout by touch: the rough weave of the gauze rolls on the left, the heavy rubber strap of the tourniquet coiled across the top. I'd set it up so I could grab what I needed in the pitch-black without a single glance.

Out past the narrow gray edges of the pass, the valley ran flat and featureless for a mile until it hit the yellow lights of Zaroff's compound. They had the radio on. The music drifted across the dirt, thin and tinny, but clear enough that I could hear the melody. Someone honked a car horn twice, and the laughter flared up again.

I kept my ears locked onto it, trying to drown out the silence, trying not to listen for the heavy, rhythmic thud of hooves.

They were still drinking. Drinking meant they weren't done. Or it meant they'd put a bullet in him an hour ago and left the radio playing while they finished their drinks over his body.

A wave of sickness hit my stomach. Earlier, I'd tied a strip of my own dirty gauze to a low mesquite branch and walked away. That was all the communication I had left for him. A white rag fluttering on a thorn, and then a mile-long retreat to sit in the dark with a gun I could barely carry.

Above me, the sole of Ransom's boot ground against the limestone. "Doc."

"I'm awake."

"When he comes through that pass—"

"If," I corrected.

"When he comes down, are you going to be able to work? Because Sierra's kit is your job. The rest is mine."

"It's both."

"Uh-huh." Cloth scraped rock above me as he shifted onto his elbows.

I kept my eyes fixed on the gray gap of the pass, two hundred yards away.

"Left of the sternum," I said. "Fourth intercostal space, two inches off the midline. There's no wind in this pass. I'll have him inside two hundred yards. The round will open the right ventricle. He'll stay on his feet for six seconds, maybe eight, because his brain won't have received the news yet. Then his knees will buckle, he'll drop into the dirt, and he'll drown in his own blood with his eyes open. It takes some time. I’ll stand over him until the last beat, and I won't move."

The pass fell quiet again. Farther down, near the bottom of the draw, a horse stamped once in the brush, and Cruz murmured something low until it quit.

"When did you decide that?" Ransom asked.

"In the barn. While Sierra was saddling a horse I was too weak to climb onto."

I waited for him to call me a liar, or a hypocrite, or a fool. He didn't. He breathed out through his nose and lowered himself back onto his stomach.

"All right, Doc," he said. “Shot’s yours.”

Then the radio quit in the middle of a verse.

The silence hit hard when the music cut out. A mile of empty dirt swallowed the sound all at once, leaving nothing but the hard, hot thump of my own blood behind my ears. No laughter. No horn. Just the cold.

Then, out in the dark, a rifle cracked.

I heard Ransom's boots scrape the rock above me as he pulled himself up, then go perfectly still. Nobody down the line made a sound. The cold in my hips vanished, replaced by a sudden, scalding rush of heat. I pressed my palm hard against the bite mark on my chest, gripping the rifle stock with my other hand, and forced myself to breathe through my nose, waiting out the silence.

Then I heard him.

Bare feet slapped against the hard clay out in the dark. Slap-thud, slap-thud. The rhythm was broken. One heel hit hard, the other barely touched, a desperate, limping pace that refused to slow for the pain. Behind that ragged drumming came the horses. A lot of them. A wide, rumbling line of iron shoes striking stone, fan-spreading across the desert and closing fast.

I slid my thumb onto the cold metal of the safety and clicked it off.

Coyote came through the mouth of the pass at a dead sprint. The moonlight caught him all at once, stark and greasy gray against the dark rock walls.

He was completely naked. Dark mud and filth caked him from ankle to hip, and the right side of his face was a mess. The cheekbone and brow swelled into a gray lump, burying his right eye. Silver duct tape wrapped his right forearm, wrist to knuckle, splinting it against a wooden paint stirrer. His exposed fingers had swollen blue and useless.

But his good left hand was clenched around a dirty wad of cotton gauze. My gauze. He had carried it a mile through the dark in the only hand he could still close.

Every instinct I had as a doctor slammed into me: the urge to jump down, to splint, to clean, to check his pupils, to stop the bleeding. I had to physically force my jaw shut to keep from calling out to him. He was below me, running for his life, and the only help I could give him was to stay frozen.