Page 41 of Blood Hymn

I find the keys on Beau's belt. My fingers aren't working right, and it takes me three tries to find the one that fits the cuffs. I kneel in front of Nellie first because she's steadier. The leather is stiff and cracked and the old buckle sticks, and I get it open and she pulls her wrist free and rubs it and looks at my face.

"You're bleeding," she whispers.

"I know. Help me with her."

We get Lacey loose together. She fights us. She doesn't know who I am. She sees a big man with blood on his shirt and a knife in his hand leaning over her in the room where she's been chained for hours. She claws at my face and kicks and screams for her mama. Nellie gets down on the floor beside her, wraps both arms around her, and holds on.

"He's with Evie," Nellie tells her, over and over. "He's with Dee's sister. He came to get us. He's good. He's good, Lacey. Look at me. He's good."

Nobody's ever called me that except the old man, and he meant something else.

Lacey stops screaming. She looks at me over Nellie's shoulder, shaking, snot and tears all over her face.

"We have to go," I tell them both. "Right now. Can you walk?"

Nellie nods for both of them.

I take Roy's pistol off his hip, pick my Glock up off the floor, take the lantern, and I make them go up the stairs ahead of me. I don't want them looking back at the room. Lacey looks anyway. I watch her see the names on the walls for the first time, in the swinging lamplight, and I watch her understand what they are.

The keys to the green Chevy are in Tyler Guidry's jacket pocket. I get the girls into the back seat and tell them to lie down on the floorboard and not come up for anything. Then I sit behind the wheel in the dark alley with the dome light off and pull up my shirt.

It's bad. I knew it was bad from the way it went in. A stab wound in the left flank, an inch and a half wide, below the ribs, and it's not bleeding the way a cut bleeds. It's welling. Steady, dark, not spurting. That's something. If it had nicked an artery I'd already be on the floor. But it's deep. Deep enough that I can feel something wrong in there when I breathe, a hitch, a catch, like a stitch in my side from running that doesn't go away.

I tear open the first packet of hemostatic gauze with my teeth and pack it into the wound with two fingers, pushing it in deep the way the pictures on the packet show, and the pain comes then, finally, all at once, white and huge, and I bite down on the collar of my thermal and don't make a sound. The girls are listening on the floorboard behind me. I pack the second packet on top of the first. I tape it down hard, around and around my waist, as tight as I can pull it.

My hands are shaking when I'm done. I sit there a minute with my forehead on the steering wheel and breathe.

A tool that needs a doctor is a tool that talks.

I start the truck.

I don't go to the fellowship hall. I thought about it on the stairs. It's where they belong, with the other nine, asleep on the floor with their pillows. But Charlotte handed them to the Guidrys with a smile four hours ago, and if they walk back through that door in their pajamas at four in the morning, she'll be on the phone to Judah before they've got their sleeping bags unrolled. They'll be back in that room by daylight, or somewhere worse.

So I take them where nobody knows to look.

I drive the Chevy out the lease road with the lights off and leave it in the cane a quarter mile from the water. The girls climb out and stand close together in the dark, shivering, Nellie in her one sock and Lacey in a nightgown. I don't have anything to give them. Everything I brought is soaked or bloody.

"It's a long walk," I tell them. "Some of it's water. It'll be cold and it'll be dark and you'll want to stop. You can't stop. Hold onto the back of my belt and put your feet where mine go. Understand?"

Lacey doesn't answer. Nellie hooks her fingers through my belt loop and takes Lacey's hand with her other one.

"We understand," Nellie tells me.

It takes almost two hours. It should take one. I have to stop three times. The first time it's to let Lacey rest when she sits down in the shallows and won't get up. The second time it's for me. My legs go out from under me on a mud bank and I'm on my knees in the reeds without knowing how I got there, and Nellie crouches beside me, holding my arm in both her hands, not saying anything, just holding, until I can stand. The third time I don't remember at all. I only know that when I come back to myself I'm on my feet, and Nellie has hold of my belt, and she's the one leading.

The sky is going gray when the gauge house comes up out of the mist on its concrete pad.

The steel door is standing open.

Evie is in it. She's barefoot, in her jeans and my black sweater with the sleeves shoved up, with the AR-15 at her shoulder aimed straight at the three of us coming out of the reeds. Her face is white. Her hair is wild. She's been standing there a long time. I can see it in the way her shoulders are set.

She sees Nellie. The rifle drops.

"Oh God." She comes off the pad into the water to her knees and grabs Nellie and pulls her in, and grabs Lacey too, both of them, and holds them hard against her in the gray light with her eyes shut. "Oh God. Oh my God. You're all right. You're all right."

Then she opens her eyes and looks at me over their heads.

I watch her face go from relief to fury to something else in the space of a breath. She's looking at my shirt. Even in the half-light I know what she's seeing. The thermal is black to the waist on the left side, stiff with it, and the tape under it has gone dark all the way through.