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The ankle hurt, but she could put her weight on it. Not broken, she told herself, and limped away from the Blazer. She had taken the keys from the ignition and snapped them in the outside pocket of her jacket. Donating her vehicle to her attacker and spending the night under a juniper would not be a happy ending.
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That's all she got.
Having circled three-quarters of the way around the hill she saw, half a mile or more away, a tiny figure. Blurred and indistinct in khaki clothes or desert camouflage, it trotted over a ridge and down out of her line of sight. The shooter could have been six feet tall or six inches, black or white, male or female. All the hard-won sighting told her was that he was probably headed back toward Carlsbad's headquarters, and she'd already guessed that much.
Adrenaline, vengeance, hope all abandoned her at once, and suddenly she was so tired it was an effort to draw breath. Her ankle throbbed, drumming its dissatisfaction at the recent abuse. Cold poked icy fingers into her ears, irritating the eardrums. Brent's blood caked and itched on the skin of her face and neck. Eschewing cowboy delicacy, she called down vile imprecations on all things living and dead, on the wind and the cold, the uneven dirt and the knife-edged plants. By the time she'd reached the truck she'd used up the vocabularies of several generations of sailors and, had there been any truth to the conceit, would have left a blue streak as wide as the Danube in her wake.
Brent didn't carry a radio in his vehicle. As he wasn't BLM or NPS, it made sense. A
When she reached the highway she goaded the Blazer along at sixty five miles per hour in third gear rather than trash her ankle further. Finally she could stand the whine of the engine no longer and used her right foot to shove in the clutch. The Blazer careened into the oncoming lane. "Never a cop around when you need one," she growled as she righted the vehicle; then she smiled. Anything taken to absurd extremes ran the risk of becoming ludicrous. Even ambient crankiness.
The Bureau of Land Management offices were on the east side of town, off the main drag. On impulse, A
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The BLM offices were as lackluster as could be expected of new government buildings. Efficient and featureless in neutral tones and cubicaled spaces. The receptionist, a young Navajo man with shoulder-length black hair tied neatly in a ponytail, squeaked like a rabbit when A
He was not reassured. Hand halfway to the receiver he froze, staring at her blood-black fingernails on his arm. In vain, she tried to find the words that would ease his mind. Finally, she said, "Is Holden Tillman here? He'll know what to do with me."
Magic words, "Holden Tillman." A
The receptionist returned, Holden swinging on crutches at his heels.
"Sorry, Holden," A
He took in her bloodstained person, the dusty clothes, her crippled stance. "A local's been complaining about traffic noise on the northwest boundary, but I expect it can wait." He smiled his slow smile, and A
"I've just come from there," she said. "And the only traffic was me, but I did stir up a bit of dust."
Holden did everything right, wearing all hats at once: EMT, bureaucrat, husband, father, friend. Hot coffee was fetched. A
Holden underwent a marvelous metamorphosis. As he tended her, she watched him change from the uncertain palsied man who'd killed his patient through negligence to the confident man of understated command he'd been when she'd first met him. Roxbury's death was not good news to Holden; there was nothing of relief or relish in his new attitude. It was that he saw the shooting as A
Only after she'd been cared for and was firmly on the road to being human again, did Holden begin to dig for details. The sheriff had come. Holden had timed it so she'd only have to tell her story once.
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That impish spark in the child's eyes was the only physical resemblance he had to his dad. A
Rhonda drove, A
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