Page 14 of Ransom
"Drop it."
"You're going to kill a man who smells like you." He looked up at me, grin gone, eyes steady and old in a young face. "That's a new one. Even for us."
I crouched beside the fire pit and started building a fire because I needed something to do with my hands that wasn't looking at Winston's lips.
"We find out what he knows," I said. "Who sent him. What he's told them. Then we call Rafe."
"And then?"
The kindling caught. I fed it piece by piece until it took.
"And then we do what we always do." I stared at the fire. "We protect our own."
Coyote was looking at me like he'd looked at Winston in the dirt. Head cocked. One eye shut.
"When you can't do it," he said, "come find me. I'll do it for you."
Somebody had taken asledgehammer to my head and gone back for seconds.
When I tried to lift my arm, I found I couldn't move worth a damn. Sand pinned my arms and legs, everything from the neck down locked tight as a drum. I tried to shift and got exactly nowhere, which sent the sledgehammer pain from the back of my skull straight through to the space between my eyes where it set up camp and started a bonfire.
I opened my eyes.
It was dark. Firelight flickered off to my left, close enough I could feel the heat on my face. The air smelled like smoke and juniper and something else underneath it, something animal and wild. My head pounded. The world tilted sideways, so I closed my eyes and breathed through my nose until the urge to throw up passed.
I cracked my eyes open again, slower this time, and looked down at myself.
I was buried in sand up to my neck. Packed in tight, arms pinned to my sides, the whole works tamped down hard enough that I couldn't so much as wiggle a finger. My boots were down there somewhere under about three feet of New Mexico dirt, and the only parts of me I could move were my head and my mouth, which was just about the worst combination of mobility a man could ask for in a situation like this.
My pulse came up fast at the base of my throat, faster than it ought to be, and the breath I was pulling in didn't seem to go down all the way. I steadied it. Made it go down. Panicking with three feet of dirt on your chest was a way to suffocate yourself before anyone got around to killing you.
I turned my head carefully, testing for worse damage, and took stock of my immediate surroundings. There was a fire pit to my left, ringed with stones. A canvas lean-to was strung between two pines. Bones hung from the branches on bits of wire, clicking together in the breeze like some kind of deranged wind chime. The horses were gone. Roy Castillo's body was gone.
And they'd taken my hat.
Now that pissed me off more than the concussion, more than being buried alive, more than the very real possibility that I was about to get killed in the middle of nowhere by a man whose cock I'd had in my mouth. That hat was a genuine Stetson, broken in just right, and I'd had it for six years. You didn't just take a man's hat. There were rules about that kind of thing.
I was fixing to say something about it when voices came through the dark behind me.
"I can hear your brain grinding from here," said an unfamiliar voice. "Sounds like bees."
"Shut up, Coyote." That was Ransom.
"You don't want to kill him."
Ransom didn't answer that, which was about as good an answer as any.
"You fucked him," Coyote said, cheerful as Sunday morning. "That's why. You got attached. Happens to dogs too. You feed them once and they follow you home."
"I said shut up."
"Are we killing him or keeping him? I need to know. Nimue's getting hungry."
There was a pause. Then Ransom's voice came quieter. "We need to know what he told them first. Who knows he's out here."
"He told nobody," Coyote said. "He came alone. He's a stupid Ranger. A stupid, pretty Ranger who let you fuck him in a shack."
"Shut up."
