64
They came around a final bend and found the El Camino broadside to the road as before and the cruiser beyond it downslope. Both the sheriff and his deputy were breathing harshly. The full moon hung above them on its high sweep, and on the deputy’s wrist a small round face lit from within told them it was just midnight. The deputy unlocked the cruiser and opened the rear door and went to the other side to help the sheriff arrange the girl along the bench seat, her body so meager in the folds of clothes. He saw something protruding from one of the jacket pockets and after a moment understood that it was a shoe. The other running shoe.
“How’s that, Caitlin?” said Kinney. “Can you ride like that?”
She nodded, gazing around the interior as if it were the cockpit of a spaceship. Kinney told the deputy to start up the cruiser and get the heat going, then he had him radio Summit County for ambulances and officers. When that was done the deputy came around again and stood behind the sheriff who was still tending to the girl.
“You want the emergency kit, Sheriff?”
Kinney looked more closely at the wound in the dome light. The blackened curled lip of skin with its bright scarlet fissures. “No, I’d rather spend the time driving toward the EMTs. And anyway I don’t believe we can do much better than what’s been done.” He reached for the belt below her knee and noticed for the first time the silver oval of buckle, the snakehead with its ruby eyes, and for a moment it froze him, as the face of a true viper would. Billy had put it on that morning, or whenever he’d gotten up. Mindlessly fastening the buckle and getting on with his day. Then Kinney thought of the girl’s father, Grant, and the boy Sean, down on the ranch. Going about their day, their night, with no idea, just no idea. He uncinched the belt and watched for the blood to seep from the wound and cinched it again.
What in the hell, he thought. Just what in God’s own hell.
“Sheriff,” she said as he was withdrawing from the cruiser. She’d removed Billy’s glove. She held out her bare fist. He reached in and cupped his hand and the keys dropped into his palm.
“He gave them to me,” she said.
“Okay. You lie still now. We’re gonna get you to the hospital before you can say boo.” He moved to shut the door and again she said, “Sheriff.”
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry. What I did to him.”
He didn’t understand. “Hush, now,” he said. “Don’t talk.”
“Sheriff?”
“Yes?”
“Do you have a phone?”
“There ain’t no signal up here, sweetheart.”
“Can I just hold it?”
He found the phone and she closed her bare hand around it and rested her fist on her chest.
He shut the door and handed Billy’s keys to the deputy. “I need a favor, Donny.”
“Ask it, Sheriff.”
“I need you to stay up here with this car. Just stay here with the shotgun and don’t do nothing else but keep an eye out. If there’s another man up here I don’t want him getting by you, is that clear? You put him down before he gets by.”
“I will, Sheriff.”
“It won’t be long before Summit County gets here.”
“Don’t worry, Sheriff.”
Kinney clapped a hand on the deputy’s shoulder and stepped to the driver’s door, and then stood there, ready to open the door. The deputy hadn’t moved.
“What is it, Deputy?”
The deputy sawed his finger under his nose.
“Donny,” said Kinney.
“She was chained up like a dog in that shack, Sheriff. Looks to me like she did that to herself. With an ax.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, Sheriff.” The deputy looked down. “Hell. There was two feet up there. Human feet. Just lying there. Like shoes. One of hers and one of his. Billy was already dead when it happened, you could tell.”
He looked up again. “Now why would she do a thing like that, Sheriff?”
Kinney studied the dark shape of the girl in the back of his cruiser. Pale oval of face in the shadows. He heard again the sounds they’d heard from the trail: one wooden blow. Then the other. Lord God if only she’d waited fifteen, twenty minutes, he thought. But there was a man up there with a gun and she might not have had twenty minutes or even ten.
He turned back to the deputy. “Why do you reckon she did it, Donny?”
The deputy bumped the barrel of the shotgun against his leg. “I’d say she did it for practice, Sheriff.”
Kinney nodded. “That’s how it looks to me.”
He opened the cruiser door and got in and switched on the headlamps, spilling light once more over the road and the deserted El Camino. He turned to speak to the girl but she was out, the phone still clutched to her chest. He powered down the passenger’s window and told the deputy to look sharp. Told him to be nothing but smart and he would see him later at the hospital, and then the deputy stood to watch the sheriff back the cruiser deftly down the road.