Page 40 of Branded

It’s running from a cut below his elbow, bright and fast, dripping off his fingers into the dirt. For a second the whole world narrows to that one red line and I can’t hear anything.

I fumble a sterile pad out of my field kit and press it into his hand. My fingers aren’t working right.

“Hold that.”

“Are you hit?”

“No.”

He checks anyway. His eyes go over me, head to boots and back, fast and hard. He doesn’t put his hands on me. He looks me over like he’s counting, then closes his eyes for one second. His breath shakes.

My pulse is high enough to blur the edges of my vision. I brace my palm against the pipe and name what’s true. One shot. One broken chain. Engine west. No shooter. No plate. No face.

The list doesn’t help.

He’s bleeding. He stepped in front of me without thinking, the same way he stepped in front of the cattle, and there is a hole in a chain six inches from where his head was.

“Garrett.” My voice comes out wrong.

“I’m all right.”

“You’re bleeding on my evidence.”

“Then put it in the report.” He tries for dry and misses by a mile. He’s still pale. He’s still positioned between me and the road. “Tessa. Look at me.”

I do. His face is inches from mine. There’s a fleck of wood in his eyebrow and dust in the lines by his eyes, and he’s looking at me like there is nothing in all thirty-eight thousand acres but this.

“You’re all right,” he says quietly. Not a question.

“I’m all right.”

“Okay.” He doesn’t touch me. His free hand is flat against the pipe, an inch from my shoulder, white-knuckled. “Okay.”

We stay like that behind the post until Mercer clears the near brush. It’s maybe four minutes. It feels much longer and much shorter. Neither of us says anything else. I can feel every inch of the space he keeps between us. For the first time, I understand he is keeping it for me, at a cost, while a man who just shot at us is still somewhere in the brush.

The broken chain has twisted through the latch and jammed the gate. Cole shows up on the far side seven minutes later with bolt cutters.

“Don’t cut it,” I call. The shot link belongs to Mercer.

The lower hinge sits inside a steel housing. Old grease covers most of it, but a clean crescent shows the cover moved recently. With Mercer recording, I use his gloved pliers on the retaining pin. It slides free far too easily. Garrett and Cole take the weight, I pull the hinge pin, and we walk out through the gap without disturbing the chain.

The medic cleans Garrett’s arm at the truck. Two fragments, a deep splinter, no stitches. I stand close enough to see. I tell myself it’s for the incident record.

He catches me watching. “It’s nothing.”

“It’s two fragments of chain and a piece of a fence post.”

“Nothing important, then.”

“You don’t get to decide what’s important in my incident report.”

The medic looks between us and becomes very interested in her tape.

Mercer drives me back to the apartment himself. Halfway there, I look down and realize there’s blood dried in the creases of my knuckles. His blood. I must have gotten it on me when I pressed the pad into his hand.

I don’t wipe it off. I sit with my hands in my lap and look at it all the way down the county road.

“You all right?” Mercer asks, without looking away from the windshield.