Page 103 of Ransom
His jaw worked, and he looked past me at Rex, who was lying on his back in the dirt. "You want to drive?"
I'd thought about it on the walk to the truck. I'd thought about putting my hands on that wheel and putting my boot on that gas pedal and feeling the tug of the rope through the chassis when it took up slack and started to pull. I'd pictured it. I'd pictured it like a thing I'd been owed a long time.
And then I'd pictured my daddy on his porch in Graham, his eyes pointed at nothing. He'd died with a lot of unfinished business in him, my daddy. He hadn't wanted me to be a Ranger. He'd told me so the day I'd put the badge on. I'd done it anyway.
"No," I said. "You drive."
He adjusted his hat. "All right."
I walked back to the tailgate and hauled myself into the bed, putting the weight on the good leg. My ribs lit up the whole side of my body. I sucked air through my teeth and put my back against the cab. Coyote climbed up after me and sat down on the wheel well with Nimue over his shoulders. Mateo and Linc climbed in after with rifles, and Fenix followed with a flashlight.
"You good back there?" Ransom called out the driver's window.
"I'm good."
"Hold on."
The engine turned over. The headlights came on and threw two yellow cones across the gravel and out onto the caliche road past the back fence. The same road Joe Dancing had named for us in a prison storage closet a week ago. The same road Otis had used for Castillo, four miles of bad caliche running south out of the back of Bonney's land toward nothing.
The truck rolled forward at a crawl. The rope at the hitch tightened and went taut. Rex's body slid an inch in the dirt and stopped.
"Rex," Ransom called back. "You comfortable?"
Rex screamed something.
The truck eased forward.
The rope took up the slack with a small, dry creak. Rex's body left the gravel of the lot and hit the dirt of the road, then the caliche. The sound a man makes when he goes from gravel to caliche behind a 1978 Ford was a sound I'd never forget.
Rex made a high, broken sound through his teeth, but I wouldn't have called it a scream. I wouldn't have called it any sound that had a word in English except maybe painful.
I sat with my back against the cab. Every bad shock from the truck's springs went up through the bed, into my spine, out through my ribs. Coyote watched the road behind us with his chin on his hand and his snake on his shoulder.
Behind the truck, the dust caught the floodlight from the truck and came up in a long wall, obscuring the end of the rope where Rex was. The night carried sage, creosote, and alkali dust kicking up off the caliche. Underneath was the smell of human meat. I knew the smell. I'd worked enough bad scenes to know it. The desert was getting the first crack at Rex.
I had the dishrag in my hand, pink now, and the slow, steady throb of my nose against my collar where the bone had gone the wrong way under a rifle butt I never saw coming.
And I had Ransom Lanza's shoulders through the back glass, hat low, both hands on the wheel, the truck rolling slow enough that the dust caught up to us at every curve.
There he is. There's my cowboy.
I'd loved him with a rope around my neck. I loved him in a Ford going twelve miles an hour with a man dying behind the bumper. And I'd keep loving him after Rex was dead and buried, after they took away my Ranger star, and my gun, and everything I thought I wanted. None of it mattered now because what I really wanted out of life was sitting behind the wheel of a 1978 Ford driving through the New Mexico desert at night.
I'd thought love was supposed to flinch at this kind of thing. I'd seen plenty of love that did.
What I had in my chest right now didn't flinch.
"You're smiling," Coyote said.
"Am I?"
"A little. At the corners."
"Huh."
"It's a good smile, Ranger." He tilted his head, considering me, like he considered everything. "You don't smell scared anymore."
"I'm not."
