Page 89 of Coyote

I rolled onto my left hip and pushed up onto one elbow, waiting for the walls to stop spinning.

That was when I felt it: a spot on the side of my neck, low and hot above the collarbone. Pain flashed when I turned my head. I reached up with my good hand. My fingers found a hard, tender knot under the skin about the size of a pinto bean, with a tiny scab right in the center no bigger than a tick bite.

I knew what that knot was. It was the mark a thick needle left when somebody shoved it into a neck muscle in a hurry and didn't care how deep it went.

I let my head fall back onto the dirt and stared up at the corrugated tin. The tin ticked and popped over my head, and the heat came back down off it. I laughed because what else was there to do?

I was stock now. Not a prisoner, not a hostage, not an enemy. I'd have known what to do with any of those. I was just cattle, moved from one corral to another by a man who kept the books, owned the trailers, and slept fine.

I sat up.

Then I looked at where they'd put me, and the anger cooled.

There was chain-link on three sides, a heavy pipe frame, tin roof, dirt floor. There was a gate with a rusted hasp and a padlock on the outside, well out of reach. A steel ring was welded directly into the sheet-metal back wall, about a foot off the ground, with a thick log-chain running out of it. The ankle cuff lay open in the dirt.

I knew this place. I'd crouched right here once, on the balls of my feet with my wrists draped over my knees, asking a chained-up giant if he spoke English, and I'd slipped through that very gate. This was John's pen.

I stood all the way up. My hair didn't graze the tin. I had six inches over my head, easy, standing right in the center of the floor with room to spare.

John couldn't have stood upright in here, not once. He ducked through every door at Pae Saco and filled the doorway of the shed. Five months without straightening his spine, and he'd never mentioned it.

I turned, my boots scraping the dirt, and looked at the walls.

There, on the galvanized sheet metal of the back wall, up high. I had to tilt my head back to see them. Tally marks, four vertical strokes and a diagonal slash, over and over.

I counted the rows. Ten rows of fifty. Then a final row with eleven marks, ending in empty metal. Five hundred and eleven. It wasn't days. Five months didn't come anywhere near it.

John Jameson was a counter. He counted suture packs he'd already sorted three times. He counted my pulse when he thought I was asleep. Something had happened in this tin box that made him drop his nail and stop counting.

But below the tallies, carved smaller and with more care, was a column of names. Eight in block capitals, cut deeper than the marks above them, deep enough that my thumb dropped into the letters.

The ninth stopped partway. Two letters and the start of a third, the last stroke running off into bare galvanized steel and never turning back.

So that was the afternoon. He'd been writing a man down when the nail left his hand, and he never picked it up again, and the ninth man stayed two letters long.

Nine men out of these pens, gone out that gate and never back through it. Nobody was ever going to write them down. So the doctor did it himself. He was the only ledger they had left, and then we'd hauled him out of this yard and set him up in an equipment shed with a bucket and some gauze, and he'd never said a goddamn word about it.

The crunch of boots on the gravel came before the voice. I turned around without hurrying, letting my weight settle back onto my heels, because I wasn't going to let him see me startle.

Zaroff stood outside the wire with two of his hired hands at his shoulders. His fingers were up at his collar, working those white boar tusks he wore on his chest between them.

"Finally awake, are you?"

"Unfortunately for you."

"Why’s that?"

"Because I'm going to kill you."

He laughed, dry and easy, and I hated him for it. "Look at you. Not even ten minutes awake and already barking."

"I've spent nine years letting a snake sleep on my collarbone," I said. "You think a dog kennel makes me nervous?"

"I think you're entertaining." He dropped down into a squat on the other side of the fence, his wrists resting easily on his knees.

"Let me see the hand," he said.

"Come inside."