Page 74 of Coyote

"You need anything else, you call me." Winston tipped his hat back and slid his aviators on. "Otherwise, I'll see the rest of you all tonight."

Winston's cruiser raised dust out the service road at midmorning, and by noon the east track held nothing but the marks of my own rake. I did the only hunting left to me: I walked our whole east line on foot and dressed a smooth patch of dirt every hundred feet, so that anything crossing in the dark would leave prints. The work kept my hands busy and settled nothing else. All afternoon I caught myself thinking about that cruiser somewhere out on the county road, and every time I did, I turned and counted what stood inside the wire instead: John, Sierra, Sarah's shape at the kitchen window. Every one of them was mine to stay for.

Each time I crossed the yard, Joe's legs stuck out from under a different machine. He had rolled under the flatbed before the coffee cooled, and by late day both trucks and the tractor stood with their panels off and their seats out on the dirt. He didn't look at me. I didn't offer to help, and that sat wrong in my chest all afternoon.

The light had turned orange when he rolled out from under Linc's truck.

John and I sat on the equipment shed step with plates full of tacos, and Joe crossed the whole yard to us, wiping his hands on a rag. He stopped close enough that I had to tip my head back to hold his eyes.

He dropped a black plastic contraption about the size of a matchbook onto my plate. Two little wires stuck out of one side, clipped short.

"Linc's truck," Joe said. "Inside the loom behind the left taillight, hardwired, drawing straight off the battery whether the truck ran or not." He folded the rag into his back pocket. "My sweep never had a chance at it. I was looking for magnets and boxes, things stuck on in a hurry. This was wired in by somebody with time, and taped back so factory-clean I'd opened three other trucks before I trusted my own eyes."

I picked it up. It weighed nothing at all in my palm.

"Every feed run," I said. My mouth had dried around the words.

"Every feed run, every town run, every time that truck sat still long enough to matter," Joe said. "That's all it does. It tells him where our tires go. It never told him what track you ride at night or when. Somebody lay out there in the dark and watched that with his own eyes."

I turned the wafer over with my thumb. "He never needed a man at our table."

"There was one day between the pit and the shed," John said. "When did anybody take that truck to town?"

"The morning after you came in," Joe said. "Linc ran for Sierra's list, gauze and suture packs, and the truck sat in front of the pharmacy the best part of an hour. I fueled it when he brought it back. By then Zaroff had a stolen motorcycle and four dead men to be angry about."

"That truck hauled the gauze that patched me." John worked his jaw once under the beard.

"Good trade," I said.

Joe walked back across the yard toward the machines he'd opened up. I should have said something while his back was still close enough to say it to, but I didn't know what to say.

John's hand settled warmly between my shoulder blades. I closed my fist around the tracker until the wire ends dug into my palm.

I couldn't make Sierra's medical kit hold enough.

I sat on the equipment shed step with the kit open across my knees and counted suture packs into the lid for the second time that morning. My ribs pulled when I bent for the gauze at the bottom of the crate. Since the dead man on the east track, every count had run short: not enough hemostatic packs, not enough tubing, no whole blood at all except what walked around this ranch inside its owners' veins. I closed the lid, let the latch catch, and opened it again.

Coyote crouched in the shade at the corner of the shed, drawing a whetstone down his knife in long, even strokes. He had planted himself there every morning since the body, between me and the open yard. Across the yard, Sarah hung wash on Sierra's line, a chore she'd claimed for her own, her gray cardigan pinned between two of my shirts.

The radio on the step crackled. "Doc." Cruz's voice ran high and fast. "East wire, by the county gate. There's a man on the wire. He's alive. Doc, he's shot."

I was on my feet with the kit latched before he finished talking. Joe rolled out from under Linc's truck at the sound and had the flatbed running by the time I crossed the yard to it. Coyote vaulted into the bed behind me, and I braced my boots against the wheel well and held the kit against my chest while Joe drove us east. Every rut landed in my ribs.

Cruz and Mateo sat on their horses fifty feet back from the fence with their rifles out, exactly as they'd been taught. Past them, a man hung on the fence wire.

He had made it halfway over before his strength quit. The top strand held him folded at the waist, arms down the far side, one boot hooked in the second strand, and a dark stain had spread down his left trouser leg and dried and spread again, wet at the center. Even folded over the wire, he looked young, twenty or twenty-two, with a boy's thin neck under a week of dirt.

Coyote dropped out of the bed before Joe finished braking.

"Wait," he told me. "Ground first."

I didn't like it, but I waited. If the man had made it this long without medical attention, another few minutes was unlikely to be fatal.

Coyote circled wide with his eyes down, cut the line of the county road, and worked back along the man's trail. It didn't take him long.

"One man," he said. "On foot since the culvert, and falling. He fell there and there." He pointed at two places in the dirt that told me nothing. "Nobody walked with him, and nobody pushed him. Nothing was waiting in the culvert. He's alone." He looked at the man on the wire, and his mouth flattened. "He's wearing their colors."

"Then he's a patient wearing their colors." I was already moving. "Help me take him down."