The Dark Horse (28 page)

He shook his head violently. “No fucking way.” He glanced up. “Why? There’s nothing you’re going to be able to do for me, so just go get help.”

“If I don’t stabilize the wound, you’re going to bleed to death.” I continued to look at him. Something in my head started reciting organs along with percentages—kidney 22 percent, stomach 18 percent, bladder 12 percent, and small bowel 12 percent. Something stuck in my mind that these were bad numbers, and we should root for the smallest percentage.

He studied me. “What the fuck is wrong with you anyway?”

I tried to remember. “I think I’ve been drugged.” My cheekbone ached, and my neck muscles were still doing a pretty good imitation of a boneless chicken. “As a matter of fact, I know I’ve been drugged. Barsad said he put something in Hershel’s canteen.” “And I think something in my foot’s broken.”

“Get the fuck out of here.”

I could feel my eyes starting to close again. “Could you say fuck some more; it’s really helping.”

“Fuck you, I’m the one who’s shot in the gut.”

I fought with my jacket while trying to get the .45 back into my holster with my other hand. I couldn’t really feel my fingers, which didn’t bode well for my fixing Cliff Cly of the FBI.

I tried to focus on the case, figuring that the cipher effect might keep me awake—that, and the thought of a man who was possibly dying. But he could still talk, if with a limited vocabulary, so I was starting to think that his lung hadn’t been nicked after all. Some more facts leapt up about a collapsed lung—something about air sucking into the chest where it can’t escape, which in turn pushes the heart aside, so far, in fact, that the vessels to the heart are pinched to the point that they are closed and there is no blood flow to the heart.

I thought about it and came to the conclusion that that was bad, but it was like somebody else was talking inside my head, somebody I’d once been other than the sleepy person I was now. “So, what’s a nice bureau boy like you doing in a place like this?” I attempted to move his hands again. “Let me see.”

“Fuck you, Deputy Dawg.” His chin planted against the brace, and I watched as he tried to concentrate on not clutching the wound. He relaxed just a little, which I’m sure was for the best, and allowed his head to return to the ground. “He was ours in the witness relocation program, but after the fiasco in Youngstown we let him dangle, in hopes that he’d give us the information on his pals back in Jersey since they were looking for him. He was in Vegas, and then here.”

With his hands out of the way, I slowly unbuttoned his shirt and then carefully tore open the T-shirt at the wound. There was no sucking sound, and the blood was pooling at the depression in his skin.

“Well?”

Trying to keep my eyes open, I stretched my entire face in spite of my cheekbone. “It’s not as bad as I thought.”

“Yeah? Well, I feel so much fucking better.”

The voice was telling me things, and I wondered how smart was the guy I used to be? Now he was telling me about how, if it was a low-velocity, low-caliber weapon like a 9 mm, then most of the tissue damage was confined to the bullet tract, as opposed to a high-velocity, high-caliber weapon like a rifle that would result in a lot of damage to tissues and organs just by passing by them. “Energy dissipation.”

“What?” His voice was gargled, but I was pretty sure it was just mucus.

I leaned forward. “We’re hoping for no major organs or large blood vessels.”

“Well, if it’s a major organ, hopefully it’s my liver; the little fucker’s indestructible.”

Liver—30 percent.

“I think we can stop the bleeding, but you’re not going anywhere and we’re going to have to get you medical attention pretty quick.” I looked around and noticed that Wahoo Sue had moved off to the far side of the ring, probably because of the blood. She wanted nothing to do with us. The lightning had moved to the east, and it appeared that all we were going to get now was wind. “I don’t think I can move you.”

“I don’t want you to.”

“Deal.” I pulled off my neck scarf and looked at it, hoping it wasn’t too full of bacteria, and began folding it up in preparation for placing it over the wound. I thought about Martha, who had given me the silk bandana, and sighed. It was then that I saw the roll of duct tape that Wade Barsad must’ve dropped.

I reached over, picked it up, and ripped a length from the roll. Maybe it was being witness to someone else’s suffering, or having a task, or all the voices in my head, but I was actually feeling pretty good—still sleepy, but more on the dopey side than the passing-out side. I attached the one-foot piece to my scarf and ripped off another. “This stuff is great; you can use it for everything.”

He shook his head. “Oh, God.”

I completed the makeshift bandage, took a deep breath, and wished I had some whiskey. “This is going to hurt.”

“Uh huh.”

I planted the bandage squarely on the wound, pressed down, and wrapped the duct tape in all directions. He didn’t move. “There, that wasn’t so—”

“Jesus-fucking-Christ!”

I thought I’d been gentle.

The old me in my head was talking again and said that, with the ambient temperature, the blood around the wound was coagulating quickly, but the drop in blood pressure would also increase his susceptibility to hypothermia. I smirked a little to myself but then thought about the fact that no matter how smart the old me was, it was the new me that was going to have to do something about the problem. I took off my coat and carefully placed it over him.

I sat there for a moment, listening to him breathe and feeling as if I’d accomplished one of my tasks. Now, if I could just remember the others. The chain clanked and moved left.

Horse.

Dark horse. Three horses. One rider.

The boy, Benjamin.

I leaned over. “Where do you think he’ll go?”

The FBI man looked at me with one eye opened and one closed. “Who?”

I thought it was a reasonable question. “The boy . . . Benjamin.”

He took a couple of shallow breaths and then answered. “I told him to stay off the roads, but I didn’t go into it much further than that.”

“Why did Wade take him?”

He moved a little and immediately regretted it. “Fuck . . . Wade said something about a list that he’d written and that he thought his wife had taken, but he couldn’t find it so I think he thought maybe the wife had given it to the girl at the bar; then he wanted to back you off, but I guess when it became apparent that the old cowboy was headed down the mesa, all bets were off.” He looked down at the stalled blood at his abdomen. The duct tape bandage was doing a grand job. “I really didn’t think I was going to get shot; he just didn’t seem like the type.”

I thought about that and the old me said something important, which I repeated out loud. “He killed his brother.”

He scowled, and there was a little bit of blood staining his teeth. “Yeah, I guess I misjudged him. I started getting really suspicious when I found the old cowboy’s gun in the truck.”

Reminded of the Henry, I reached past him and picked it up, checking to make sure the muzzle wasn’t blocked and that it was still loaded. Loading and checking the Henry was a tedious process because the magazine tube was under the barrel, but Hershel Vanskike wasn’t the kind of man to load a weapon with only one round. “Well, he’s dead.”

“Vanskike?”

“Yep.”

He shook his head. “I was afraid of that. I brought the boy down here, but Barsad stayed back to wait for the old guy.”

“Hershel.”

He nodded. “Hershel. Said he just wanted to tell him he had the boy.”

“How did you find Barsad?”

He sighed. “Caught him returning to the motel after making one of his liquor deliveries to Bill Nolan’s place. I guess Wade couldn’t get used to keeping a low profile, so he schemed up this idea for getting Bill’s truck on a regular basis. Nolan told me about those mysterious whiskey deliveries, and it sounded like Wade.”

“So, he was staying in one of the rooms at the motel before I got there?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty good at hiding people even in a town of forty. I waited for him one night and even brought him into the bar when Pat was the only one there. Pat poured us a drink and vouched for me. That’s how we all got to be partners.”

“Speaking of drinking, that was quite a show you put on at the motel.”

“Show, hell. I was drunk.”

“Who was the girl?”

“Just a girl, but she figured out who you were before I did.”

“What about the fight?”

He laughed and then groaned. “They were getting suspicious, because I was backing away from the more severe aspects of the partnership.”

“Like?”

“Killing you.” His eyes shifted to mine. “I convinced them that I could just run you off.” He raised a hand and tapped the plastic brace at his neck, and even in my stupor, I could see his movements were starting to slow. “Then I convinced him to let me come up here and keep an eye on the three of you, but he came along because he wanted to check on that horse—wanted to see it die. Patience is not a strong suit with Wade, but torture is.”

“I’m getting that.” I took a deep breath. “So, he did set the barn on fire and kill the other horses?”

“Yes.”

I nodded along with him, until I felt myself falling forward again. The old me voice was shouting about abdominal infection, that he only had hours, and that pretty soon Cliff Cly of the FBI was going to start showing more sleepiness and fatigue.

Welcome to the club.

I put the old repeater in my lap, pulled out my .45, and wrapped the FBI agent’s hand around the grip. “You’ve got five rounds, and you’re cocked and ready to fire.” He looked at me as if I were insane. “You’re too weak to handle this Henry, so I’ll take it.”

Within twelve hours fever was going to set in, his heart rate and respiration would go up; the heart rate would be unable to make up for failing blood pressure, and as soon as the organs were not getting enough blood they would fail. At this point, the smarty-pants voice was telling me, he would get weak, dizzy, drift in and out of consciousness, and within seventy-two hours, he would die.

“I’ve got to go.”

“What?”

“I’m going to fall over if I don’t get out of here, in which case you’re going to rapidly follow me into oblivion and Barsad’s going to find the kid, none of which are acceptable.”

“Your foot’s broken—you can’t walk out of here.”

I rolled to one side and dug a knee up, placed my hands on the ground, and struggled to my feet. I kept my weight on one side, using the Henry as a crutch. “I’m not going to walk.”

“Then what are you going to do? We don’t have anything to . . .” His voice faded as I stood and hopped, facing the circle of dark ground. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding.”

I pulled my hat down and kept my weight off my damaged foot; I felt like James Arness but probably looked more like Ken Curtis. There was more than just my voice talking now, as I listened to the wind that scoured the top of the mesa. It sounded like phantoms brooding and mourning in a testament to nostalgia and bitterness, and I could almost hear the chattering of the dry leaves in the cottonwoods, moaning and hissing from the powdery river below. Ancient voices pulled me apart from myself and slammed me back together.

I turned my head and looked at Cly over my shoulder. “Cliff, where are you from?”

His voice still gargled. “What?”

I repeated the question and, unsurprisingly, my voice didn’t sound like my own.

“Cherry Hill, New Jersey.”

“That’s near Philadelphia?”

“Just over the bridge.”

“That’s what I thought.” I limped to the edge of the circle. “Remind me to introduce you to somebody—you’ve got vocabulary in common.”

I don’t know how long it’d been since anybody had stepped onto that dark piece of ground, but the response was what I figured it would be. At first, she stayed at the farthest length of the chain, then she snorted and pawed the ground, and gave one headlong charge toward me.

I just stood there. Horses had charged me before, and it can be some kind of intimidating, but I didn’t move. She pulled up about ten feet away, eyes wild, and then reared. The big black mare pawed the air, and I could see the steel shoes that were still on her hooves. She planted and, when I still didn’t move, she bounced on her forelegs and planted again; this time she was five feet away.

I held the rifle at my side, took a breath, and held out a hand, fingers in, palm down. She backed away, snorting and shaking her head at me, her tangled mane flying.

I took a step toward her, more of a hop, really, and she rushed forward, turned and sent me flying with her substantial rump. I landed hard on the ground just outside the circle.

After a respectful moment, he spoke. “That went well.”

I looked at him and remembered something Lucian, my old boss, used to say in like situations. “You know the difference between an asshole and an anus?”

He spoke from the side of his mouth. “What’s that?”

“An anus can’t say ‘that went well.’ ”

I could just lie there, but that wasn’t part of the contract, so I struggled up on one elbow and felt something fall out of my shirt. I thought it might’ve been my spleen.

Spleen—8 percent.

I fumbled at it with my stiff fingers. It was roundish and about as long as a short, fat cigar. It was grainy, and I vaguely remembered that yesterday Henry had stuffed a handful of something into my pocket along with my badge.

I glanced at Cly and held it up. “Horse treat.”

“Do all you sheriffs run around with those in your pockets?”

“You bet.”

I sat the rest of the way up and watched the mare circle the perimeter of the chain. She stamped at me again, then backed away and neighed. I stood carefully, keeping my weight to my good side, and hopped a little closer to her territory. She charged again, but it was a feint—to be honest, I’d thought the earlier one was too and that she had just misjudged her retreat.